Thirty posts per month (ppm)

What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. So I return from having written thirty posts in thirty days, totaling twenty-one thousand words. A novel is around 50,000 words, so if I had signed up for NaNoWriMo, I would have failed. Fortunately, I had actually signed up for Inkhaven.

I set a few extra restrictions for myself to breed creativity and promote quality. I’m glad I was able to maintain them all month:

No writing about Inkhaven.
No writing about writing.
All posts must be visible to everyone.

Most other residents reflected on the month’s trials on the last day of the retreat, April 30. In keeping with my restrictions, I decided to write a post I’d written before instead. So you’re only getting this reflection now. It was nice to model an abundance mindset around post topics by revisiting an old topic. It was also a stark reminder of how much improvement you can get from a month of deliberate practice.

Lighthaven was a lovely venue. You could tell its caretakers had been optimizing it to host semi-professional conferences for years. It was stuffed with nooks for conversation, books for reading, and carefully maintained natural beauty. The environments were designed for variety. Furniture I’ll remember include a kotatsu, some very nice weighted blankets, a 1750s globe, and a programmable zen garden affectionately named Sisyphus. I’d recommend attending one of the many conferences held there if you get the chance, just to appreciate the interior design.

Everyone came in with their own misconceptions of what being a writer in an environment focused entirely on writing would be like. For some reason, I envisioned myself reading more books. Instead, I found myself reading other residents’ posts. Three hundred of them, apparently. Ten posts a day. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t through repetition.

Reading ten posts a day without really trying contrasted nicely with the difficulty and time investment required to write just one post a day. Here are the results of all that investment:

Posts I regret but will fix up later

A brief history of time units: Tenths

Posts I feel okay about

Posts I was anxious about writing that would have been really hard to make outside of this context

Posts I feel good about

Posts I’m proud of

Photo of handmade pottery on an outdoor table. Over two dozen slightly different pots are arranged in rows.

That’s a really good ratio! The biggest impact is the list of posts I would never have considered writing publicly before this. One book I did read that month, Art & Fear, provided a sentence that will stay with me. “Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.” While the gap feels smaller now, more important was learning not to flinch from that feedback. Internalizing that your work is worth sharing with the world, even if it falls short of what you envisioned.

I was also glad the forcing function forced me to work on two series of posts I’d been having trouble writing. I’ve wanted to write Infinite Lives for literally ten years, and now four of its 50 parts are really real. A brief history of time units has been eating at me for less time, but still long enough to be frustrating.

I also came away with a new appreciation for editing. I spent over half an hour editing every post. The process reminds me of refactoring code to be cleaner and more cohesive. But people are more forgiving readers than machines, so editing feels significantly easier than refactoring. Trusting the edited result will be better than the first draft has even helped me grapple with the gap between vision and reality.

Socially, I acted on advice to try riskier things. A community I cared about where any awkwardness would be temporary made for a good environment to try showing more sides of myself I reflexively hide. Rose’s post on intentions gave me a well-timed framework to experiment with.

What’s next? I explicitly decided to focus on writing over making improvements to the blog, so this week I’ll work on the accumulated tweaks. Then I’d like to maintain my earlier baseline of one or two posts a week, with closer to 50% etymology than the 12% I made last month. See you on the internet!