Hufflepuffs are a Hivemind

The two biggest lessons of InkHaven

Like everyone at InkHaven, I’m writing a retrospective post. Unlike everyone else I’m writing it a month later, because InkHaven is load-bearing technology for me and now I’m without it. I’ll elaborate later in this post. But first -

Was InkHaven valuable? To me: yes, incredibly so. Before I started InkHaven I was considering quitting writing and blogging altogether. Every time I sat down to write it was painful, and I had to take Adderall to get started. I’d often spend an hour with a nearly blank screen before getting two paragraphs. I am acutely aware of how little time is left in the world, and in anyone’s individual life in particular.

I hate when time is unnecessarily destroyed. I hate filler episodes. Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of writing is one of the most important things written about writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

There are so many things to read and I cannot read all of them. I do not want to contribute to this problem! I want to make sure the things I write are actually valuable and succinct. This leads to an ever-growing spiral of “well this isn’t actually important/interesting enough to say” and it gets mentally thrown in the trash before I’ve even typed it out. Three hours later I have four lines down that go nowhere and I’m frustrated unto collapse.

Lesson 1 - Get It Out

The first gift of InkHaven was forcing me to just vomit up all the words anyway. I had to post every day. It didn’t have to be great. If I could just get the words out that was good enough. If I had time afterwards to refine them into something better, to chisel away the ugly parts and buff out the rough edges, that’s a bonus. But the focus had to be on making the words happen regardless of how bad they might be. When I was forced to stop worrying about if they were worthy of being typed or not, suddenly I had a lot more coming out.

I would not have thought this would work. I assumed the correct approach was to (falsely) believe one is The Greatest. When one thinks they are a gift unto man, their own confidence keeps them flying the whole time. It seems what actually works is just accepting that I’ll put out a lot that will be seen once and disappear thereafter. But then do it anyway. Because every now and then a muse will pick some of it to bless with Magic Good Sauce and it resonates with a lot of people for a long time. I just can’t expect any of it to be that good beforehand. I had to lean into producing things that are as true as I can make them and realize that’s the only really important part. Somehow some of it turned out great. I never would have known it would be if I hadn’t just put it out, flawed and earnestly janky.

I was worried this would drive away readers. Time is so limited! If I’m wasting my reader’s reading-hours with shovelfuls of my word-diarrhea they’re gonna stop coming. Yet the opposite happened. My total subscribers jumped 10% in one month, and two more became paid subscribers (12.5% jump, and thank you!).

I got several posts that did well and I’m very happy with, which I would not have written at all otherwise. It turns out you cannot judge the value of what you will make before you have made it. Something you thought would be great turns out soggy and flat, and something you were sure was self-indulgent slop turns out to ring true with a secret chord in the hearts of thousands. You cannot discover what things hidden under the surface are good by guessing. There is no dowsing rod for the soul. You have to just keep digging and digging and laying everything out under the sun to see which bits will sparkle.

Lesson 2 - Hufflepuffs Are A Hivemind

I brought enough Adderall to InkHaven to use every day, and double-up on most days if needed. I ended up only taking Adderall two times that entire month.

InkHaven is a place to write. It is, in a sense, a sacred space consecrated to writing. When I left my room and entered the common area each morning I saw my friends and peers sitting intently at their laptops, typing away. The atmosphere was heavy with words, quietly being channeled down into posts. You see people doing this work and your body feels it. The natural instinct is to sit down, open the laptop, and join in the communal effort.

This is who we are, the body says. This is what we do here. It flows naturally from the world into the self. It’s not just that it was easy to sit down and start writing, as opposed to the usual struggle. It’s that to not start writing would have been the struggle instead. It’s the most sublime thing I’ve experienced in work-state.

Writing is mostly lonely work. Even when you write something a lot of people appreciate, you mostly don’t see them enjoying it. You don’t get to share in the experience. Thousands of views don’t feel like anything without a smile or a fist-bump. InkHaven changed that. There we all saw each other putting our works into the world, and felt the shared effort of doing so. I grew to know the people who were writing and appreciated them as full persons. Their writing was more meaningful as I grew to know them. It was impossible to read everything that was posted, but the best posts were shared around. Even if nobody else on earth read what I wrote, I knew that a few of the people around me read a few of the things I had put out. People who saw me both as a physical being trying to be fun and kind, and as a mess of experiences and failures and successes being dragged out into public to partly bridge the endless gulf separating our souls. And I saw them doing the same thing.

I don’t need to be witnessed by millions (anymore). What I actually need is very small and very local (one might say hyperlocal). I have a very hard time motivating myself without that. It was grinding me down for years, until it totally ground me to a halt in 2025, and it took InkHaven for me to acknowledge this was the problem, and it had a solution. I have changed House. Goodbye Ravenclaw, hello all you beautiful Hufflepuffs.

I think I’ve always been somewhere near Hufflepuff in my heart. I want to know everyone. I’ve been in love with the Bohemian lifestyle of “a bunch of broke artists sleeping on mattresses in a warehouse and making art” since I was a child, purely on aesthetic grounds. Now I understand the incredible practical power of such a place. When everyone you care about and live with is focusing their life energy on the same creative channeling it is a force of nature. To be honest, I would still love to live in exactly that way. I think maybe I’ve aged out of being able to pull it off. But Jesus, what a way to actually Get The Thing Done. This is why monasteries exist. This is why remote work is toxic to the soul. We must recapture this technology. InkHaven has shown us the way.

Going Forward

Sadly I followed up InkHaven November with No-Post December. This is shameful, and I’m actually ashamed by it. I have left many threads dangling. Many things are still unsaid on topics very important to me, topics of intentional narrative and accepting masculinity and desire (and more). I can’t just leave these threads hanging, it would be a betrayal of what I started. I will take the lessons of InkHaven and incorporate them to make my productivity so much more. Regular posting will resume this month.

Though not daily posting. I also learned I can’t do that at InkHaven. A bit more on InkHaven soon, then we dive back into… everything.