June 2026 Writing Challenge
Sixteen years ago, my then-primary-partner now-best-ex was (and seemingly still is) a prolific writer of journal entries and short thought pieces. They used the website 750words.com to keep track of writing streaks and such, and I decided to join them for a month. The experience was somewhat formative for me, and led to me writing a lot more longer pieces over the intervening years. More recently, Inkhaven (http://inkhaven.blog) has sprung up as a yearly residency for writers, mostly in the rationalist sphere of influence, where everyone has to write a long form post every day for a month.
These two things, combined with many smaller influences, have motivated me to try for another solid month of writing. To celebrate my 44th birthday, I'll be writing and posting something long every day for the month of June 2026. I have a list of about twenty specific ideas so far, including topics like my coliving projects, interpersonal communication, court tactics, polyamory, and makerspaces. I'll probably include a few legal drafts as well since I've spit out a few of those every month for the last couple of years. Hopefully I'll have enough new ideas along the way to fill the rest of the month.
I'm hoping for a few different outcomes from this experience. I want to get back into the habit of writing long form posts. I want to expose people new to my social circles to my thoughts in a way I haven't really done in the last decade or so; I think the last time I knew a lot of people who were reading and responding to a lot of my long form posts was when I lived in Boston over a decade ago. I want to compare my old writings and see how I have changed, especially on a few of the days where I intend to explicitly revisit topics I already wrote about once or twice in the past. I want to distract myself from only ever doing legal drafting, which can be soul crushing work.
I don't know what standards I will hold the posts to, in terms of length or depth or time of day. Sometimes I end up writing 3000 words on a topic, and sometimes it's just 500. I don't think I want to feel compelled to expand 500 words to 750 or 1000 just to meet a target (basically how I wrote papers in high school and college). Maybe this will become clear to me in the first few days of this endeavor.
If you want to follow along, I'll be cross posting to https://sparr.substack.com, https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/, https://paper.wf/@sparr, https://facebook.com/sparr0, https://glosso.ink/u/sparr, and https://reddit.com/u/sparr, and I'll be posting links to one of those on https://twitter.com/sparr0, https://mastodon.social/@sparr, https://threads.com/@sparr0, and https://bsky.app/profile/sparr.bsky.social.