Collisteru

Waking up today was surreal. Inkhaven 2025 is almost over. As a resident, I made some of my favorite memories. An Assortment of Things that Happened 1. A few days before the event began I visited the venue. I met Ben, the author of our feast retreat, and he told me how my Bishop’s Castle essay was my admission ticket. He showed me around Lighthaven, the best venue in the world. 2. I saw Eneasz again and learned that he had moved from Denver to The Bay. There was the thud of a door closing forever. 3. Gray ran a workshop on ideation— the core of his advice was to split the idea-space into sectors, then each sector into subsectors, and then to fill each subsector with ideas. You will think of many more animals if you first try to think of all cats, then all dogs, etc. 4. Ozy told me, “There’s nothing particularly bad about your fiction, but there’s nothing particularly good about it, and this is a hard position to be in as a writer.” She taught me the differences between third person omniscient, limited, and subjective. She told me that characters need to want things. I put her advice at the top of mind as I wrote the other animal stories. It helped. I improved. 5. After looking at our average word count, Lucie calculated the date for the Inkhaven apocalypse and published this in a peer-reviewed journal. 6. Linch organized many rousing games of Blood on the Clocktower. 7. The Berkeley Problematic Properties Board inspected Lighthaven. 8. Leah McCuan set up a coffee nook in the Bayes building. Delicious coffee was had by all. 9. Jenn ran authentic relating games. 10. Screwtape helped me brainstorm ideas for a Magic: the Gathering ratfic. 11. I gave a talk on Art for Writers, which I then adapted into a blogpost series. 12. Gwern stared at my article on Africa and asked me to make it either more or less rigorous. 13. An editor from a major newspaper came for a Q&A. I shouldn’t give details. 14. We saw a forest of red trees shooting up into