Is joining for one of the two months acceptable? I'm unlikely to have the time to publish every other day in October, but might be able to join for November.
Ouch, on one hand I want to say "yes", on the other hand I imagine all kinds of slippery slopes this starts...
OK, I guess this could work: Yes, you can join on November 1st. Not on any day of November, only 1st. And then the clock starts ticking, so you have to publish your first blogpost during the first five November days.
Also, anyone who gets kicked out during October gets a second chance and can join again on November 1st.
But notice that if you only publish every other day during November, you won't have 30 articles out there until the end of November. So you get a half-Halfhaven. (And there will be no smaller fractions.)
If you are a blogger, or an aspiring blogger, and want to improve your skills, you can spend a month in Inkhaven Residency (homepage, Less Wrong post) and keep writing and publishing every day during November 2025. At the end, you will be a great writer! (At least, that is the hypothesis behind the project.) There will also be mentorship from successful bloggers, writing workshops, and feedback.
Some of us have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can't simply take a month off.
Halfhaven is an alternative, online blogging camp that allows you to produce at half the speed, from the comfort of your home. It is a Discord group with two channels: one to post links to your articles, and another (optional) to chat with your fellow writers. The only feedback or mentorship will be the ones we give to each other.
Because the point of these projects is to write a lot, we will compensate for lower speed by taking more time. We will produce 30 blogposts in two months, starting now; that is, during October and November 2025. So we start earlier, and finish at the same time.
Join the Discord group here!
The Inkhaven Residency specifies the length of an article as a minimum of 500 words (possibly less if you spent a lot of effort on e.g. a diagram or a poem). I am happy they gave us a specific number, because I didn't have a strong opinion on this. So 500+ it is.
In Halfhaven, it is also acceptable to post videos with 500 or more words of speech.
Languages other that English are also accepted.[1] But you can't post multiple translations of the same content, because that's the same thing from the perspective of writing.
The content must be original, written by you. (Not generated by an AI.[2]) AI generated images along the text are acceptable.
Do not post pornography, hate speech, or... uhm, that kind of content.[3]
The content has to be published as a blog article[4], publicly available.[5] A video has to be uploaded on a streaming platform.
The content can be published at multiple places; for example if you make 2 posts on Less Wrong, 1 video on YouTube, and 27 posts on your Substack, that together counts as 30 published blogposts.
Because we live in different time zones, it is your local date that matters. Anything published between 0:00 and 23:59 of your local time counts as published on given day. Clicking the "Publish" button one second after (your local) midnight counts as publishing the article on the next day.[6]
After publishing the article, you are expected to report it in the Discord group, preferably immediately. Just post one message containing your local date, the article serial number (between 1 and 30), the link to the article, and optionally its title. For example: "1. Oct 1 http://example.com/ My First Blogpost".
Do not publish two articles on the same day.[7] Notice that this means that you can't complete the project by posting dozen articles on the last day of November!
If you have published and reported 30 articles before the end of the project, congratulations, you have successfully achieved the goal! Feel free to keep writing or to take a break, but please do not report more articles in the project.[8]
Ideally, you should be posting every other day on average. If even that it too much for you, you get some leeway, but there are limits. I have a specific idea in mind, the details will be negotiable, but the minimum required is one article each 5 days; otherwise there is not much point at participating in this project.
Join the Discord group here!
PS:
This article has 700+ words, so your blogposts can be slightly shorter than this.[9] Or much longer, as you wish.
Curious readers can use an online translator.
Preferably, not even edited by an AI, because that often sounds the same.
I am not giving you an exact definition, but the rule of thumb is "could I get banned for posting a link to this in an Open Threat at Astral Codex Ten"?
not just e.g. shared as a Google Doc
If you want to get paid for the access to your content, you can lock it after the project is over.
I am not going to check your time zone; this is honor-based.
If you happen to write two articles on the same day, great! Keep one of them for another day. Some blogging services allow you to automate later posting.
Participants should not feel peer pressure to go beyond 30. Thirty blogposts in two months is already an amazing number, let's not taint this feeling.
No, I am not counting this post towards my limit. Or anything I might post later related to Halfhaven. That would feel like cheating. Note: This is a rule I only apply to myself. Other participants are perfectly free to go as meta as they wish.