That's it. Halfhaven is over. I wrote 30 blog posts in October/November. And so did 6 of the other participants, out of a total of 23. Algon wrote the greatest number of posts, 45, and three participants tied for the least at only one post. The average number of posts per participant was 13.1, which is less than half of the required number. I understand why. While I managed to finish, it was hard. Writing every day is hard. Especially if you still have to live your life and work full time and so on. There were many days I didn't feel like it, or was too busy, or was sick. But the fact we had two months instead of one made it possible for me. Thanks to whoever came up with that idea. I originally thought it was dumb and overcomplicated, and I was wrong.
Inkhaven, the in-person residency in San Francisco, had a much greater completion rate than Halfhaven. It seems from the tracker like nobody missed a post? I wonder how much of that is because of the encouraging environment, how much comes from the fact that the residents could focus on writing full time, and how much came from the threat of expulsion if they missed a post. While Inkhaven is more like university, Halfhaven is more like Coursera. We Halfhaven participants had none of these advantages, and I'm proud that I managed to do the hard thing in spite of the odds.
My most popular post of the ones I posted to LessWrong was Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld with a score of 114. I think this hit the right balance of thoughtful and appealing to the target audience. My least popular was Unsureism: The Rational Approach to Religious Uncertainty, with a score of -7. My attempt at satire, which LessWrong didn't like. I didn't post everything there, and I'm sure there's a few they would have disliked even more.
I definitely improved my writing a lot during Halfhaven. I feel myself developing a voice, cutting unnecessary fluff, and having more structure to my writing.
Some people are going to keep posting every week, which some people are calling "foreverhaven", but which I call "having a blog". I'll probably do the same. One post every two days isn't enough to make posts I'm proud of. I ended up spending more than two days on some posts, and blasting out some in an hour or two. I also want to do more short fiction for a while like The Confession. I've already written the first draft for my next short story.
Thank you everyone who participated, even if you didn't finish. Thanks for posting in the Discord and creating an environment where I felt I should keep posting too. Thanks for the interesting posts. And thanks for checking out these digest posts. Good luck with your future writing, and maybe I'll see you next year!