Contra Jenn on How to Do Inkhaven Good

This isn’t really a contra post because I agree with most of Jenn’s advice¹. However, I am on my period and in a mood to be contrary, and furthermore have just had to scrap the post I was working on this week for being both too culture-war-adjacent and not saying anything very interesting, so I will be framing this advice post in an unnecessarily contrary way.

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The advisors don’t matter. I hardly asked for feedback on any of my posts at all, not because I was scared, but because I just didn’t care what some random guy thought about my writing. I knew what I was trying to do with my posts, and whether or not I was doing it well by my own lights. When I told Scott this, he said that that meant I’m already a true blogger, so, take that.

When I did ask for feedback, I asked for it from specific residents who I knew would understand the vibe I was going for. Do that rather than being dazzled by the big names, who are really only there so they could list them on the website to attract you to Inkhaven in the first place (hot take, not actually true). But in order to identify the residents who will get your vibe, you’ll need to:

Meet everyone, on purpose, as soon as possible. At the end of the month, a lot of people were like, “Oh no, there were so many people I didn’t get the chance to meet!” or even “I met someone on the second to last day who I really vibed with, and I’m sad I didn’t know them before!” Luckily it’s easy to not end up in this state! You could run a speed-friending event. Or just make a point of starting a conversation with every person you see who you haven’t yet met (which is what I did).

Even if you choose to spend the month heads-down writing, having a five-minute conversation with every other resident will take <5 hours out of the 480 waking hours in the month. It’s worth front-loading this so you can make sure you meet the person who will become your best friend before it’s too late!! Don’t trust the Names & Faces doc; it is insufficient to identify the people you will vibe with the most.

Don’t use AI. The person I worked with probably the most at Inkhaven was a non-native speaker, and would always ask an LLM to identify mistakes and non-native phrasing before posting. The few times that I was watching over his shoulder as he did this, I disagreed with every single one of the LLM’s suggestions. It led him astray and made his writing worse, and also sometimes failed to catch actual errors in his English. I don’t use AI at all and look at me! Successfully writing things that probably have mistakes and who cares!

You don’t need AI. It needs you. Don’t give in.

Ball pits are for kids. Because I never sent any posts to advisors, I never earned access to the ball pit. However this was not a tragedy, because the ball pit was in fact much too small for an adult to comfortably occupy. Instead, find some kids, and watch them play in the ball pit.

Remember that there is life outside of Inkhaven. On the one hand, I spent almost every possible waking moment at Inkhaven in November. On the other hand, being so intensely In It made me briefly hypomanic and (somewhat less briefly) physically ill.

Step out through the gates. Talk to your loved ones. Go be in a park for a while, or go to an event. Inkhaven will still be there when you get back. Until it’s not.

1. https://www.jenn.site/opinionated-advice-on-doing-inkhaven-good/