8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

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  • Hard Numbers

    Here’s the thing about a job that meany people overlook: everything ultimately needs to lead back to some kind of measurable, fungible value. Ah capitalism, you nasty freak.

    I managed a team of web developers for half a decade and as manager I had a lot of tasks—but not the least of these (and in fact arguably one of the most consistent and time consuming of these) was tracking metrics. 

    I had to put numbers to productivity. I had to match quantifiable costs against measured returns, make graphs of employee time spent per tasks, public page interactions, project cost recovery models, marketing investment return projections. Everything had to to be tracked, measured, plotted, and understood.

    Now that I’ve been create something of my own, for the sake of art, it has been too easy to fall into this same trap: measuring word counts, tracking web stats and search engine placements, allocating resources to audience building and working to balance effort with return based on numbers, even if some of those numbers are only tracked in my head.

    When your profession and passion collide, what is there to do?

    How do you stand arms length from the quantifiable measures of your art, words, and music as demanded by the professional side of the craft—often inseparable and important—and yet still find the mental space to think of it as a qualitative act measured in vibes and feels and beauty? 

  • Story Mistelling

    Beloved vlogbrother, Hank Green, has made or otherwise alluded to the point in a few videos[1] over the last couple years that sometimes the story is more interesting that the truth.

    Compounding this as an actual issue is that some people value the story—or the value of the story as a political tool, say—more than they value the truth.

    In other words: some people lie and invent stories to serve their own ends. Uh, no kidding, huh?

    I have written about storytelling on this site a disproportionate amount. I am planning on typing the word “storytelling” at least a few hundred more times before I stop posting here.

    So, it makes me wonder: have we reached a pivotal point in history where the art of telling stories is intertwined too dramatically and damningly to think of it anything other than as the dark side of the equation: is storytelling a tool for manipulation, lies, and propaganda?

    Well, yeah. Obviously.

    Though I don’t think Green’s point was meant to be taken as a call to abandon the ship of human tales and interesting fiction.  Instead, it was a call to vigilance.

    After all, I could theoretically bop someone on a head with the hammer and thus use it for dark deeds. I could also fix my fence with the same tool. The former use case does not mean we need to ban hammers. It means that we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of people who bring hammers into places where hammers are not meant to be.

    In the same way we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of fiction and stories implanted into places where they are not meant to be: politics, science, medicine, and more.

    Keep telling stories, of course. 

  • Pitch Brand

    I’m pretty sure I once missed out on an interesting job opportunity because my head froze up when the interviewer asked me if I could make his social media profile go viral.

    What does that even mean?

    I mean… I get it. He wanted a million followers. He wanted to be influential. Fame. Adoration. Social capital. He wanted to be known and heard with a notification tab that needed to be silenced lest it wake the neighbourhood.

    To me, the shy auteur and guy who values meaningful connection and measured interaction with real people, I found myself floundered by the question that came out of nowhere in the middle of a seemingly average job interview.

    They keep telling us we live in the digital era, but I often think they’ve got it wrong. We live in the influencer era: social media as invaded every aspect of every layer of our lives and we have all become no less than personal brands who spend the day crafting illusions of our lives to share into those spaces. Even choosing to not participate becomes a meaningful action, one that defines a person and commodifies their social footprint.

    Personally… I loathe it.

    But it is inescapable and pervasive—and the reality of our times.

    What’s a creative soul to do but figure out how to not get swept up in the digital river and washed away by the social networks.

    Under the category of Pitch & Brand, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Trek Blurbs

    Back in grade school I had a million ideas, and no filter.

    Of course, following through on any of them was not my strongest suit. After all, I was in class all day and doing extra curricular activities in the evening and, heck, those computer games were not going to play themselves.

    But I do recall something that I did with a kind of dedicated passion: I wrote Star Trek blurbs.

    See, my friends and I (gasp, you’re shocked I can tell) were very much nerds. Such nerds were we, in fact, that our lunch hour passion was discussing the detailed nuances of Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes (which at the time were freshly aired on television.)

    One of the ways I took this a step further than my friends was to pull out a blank sheet of paper, sketch the Star Trek logo on the top half of the page, and then write a one hundred-ish word plot outline for a dream episode of my own creation.

    I admit now, those plots I wrote were pretty derivative and simplistic, but over the course of a couple years of school I made about thirty, brought them to show my friends, and dreamed of sending them into the writing staff for the obvious fame and fortune that such an effort would bestow.

    I never actually wrote an episode (nor have I since done anything in the realm of fan fiction, for anything) but I can’t help but be struck now, nearly forty years later, by the raw enthusiasm of kiddo-me not giving a single whiff about what others thought and the joy such a creative pursuit brought me.

    Oh, to be fourteen again, huh?

  • November Novel

    It may be July as I write this, but that’s just all the more reason to wonder why I can’t seem to crack the secret writing formula that four times pushed me to write a complete novel in one month.

    For something like twenty years there was an online challenge called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (poorly named because it was really a borderless event, little ole me here in Canada participating). A bunch of scandals[1] left the organization which was behind the event-proper now but a footnote creative history. Yet those of us millions who participated while it was still in good standing are left with memories… and in my own case, a small stack of unedited, mediocre novel manuscripts.

    Controversy aside, something about the urgency of a deadline broke the procrastination hold that I all-too-often find myself tethered by and… well, simply, productivity resulted.

     It is a fallacy of a sort, this whole writer’s block thing.

    When pushed by something as simple as a pretend, arbitrary deadline, I found that I was suddenly able to crank out thousands of words of coherent fiction every day for an entire month. 

    Secret writing formula? Or another lie I tell myself when I sit at the keyboard that needs to be pushed aside so that the productive side of creativity can happen?