8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Creative Positive

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

    Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

    But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

    It is not our jobs to join the rage.

    It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

    It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

    The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

    Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.

  • Resolved to Plot

    Almost two years ago now I was deep into writing a novel.

    It was not my first.

    It would not be my last.

    But yet here I sit not having finished writing it. 

    Sure, I made a plan. I sketched out the plot. And I got it about ninety percent of the way to completion, but then…?

    Then I hit a wall.

    Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and feel guilty that I didn’t write another chapter in that novel the day before. Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and part of me ponders if today will be the day that fact changes.

    So far, no.

    At the start of 2026 I resolved that just pining about standing in front of a metaphorical brick wall, a wall that I didn’t know how to climb over, or around or through was not the right approach either.

    Instead, I started a new novel.

    No. I haven’t quit the other one, rather I just need some more time to stare at that original brick wall and figure it out. But just staring at it wasn’t helping anything either. 

    Each day I get another day further from my last effort on that story, but it is not forgotten.

    And one day I’ll wake up, ponder if today, that day, will be the day… and I will be right.

  • Smouldering Plots

    It’s difficult to start a story, and it’s difficult to end a story… but somehow worse than both of those parts there is a hump I have found that occurs somewhere in the middle.

    I have been writing a new novel and I am at the point where I need to move from the start, the inciting action where all the characters are introduced and dive into the middle, the guts of the story where all the action and the bulk of the story is going to happen.

    I did all this work on planning out a plot.

    I did all this work creating characters.

    I did all this work lighting the fire to make it all start.

    And whilst I did think a lot about how the flames were meant to keep smouldering for the next couple hundred pages of real story, getting over that hump between the start and the middle, and putting it down into actual words on an actual page is turning out to be a bigger chore than I anticipated.

    If you have been reading my meandering thoughts you know that I generally keep smouldering. I just push through and write my five hundred words each day, and (practically speaking) that’s how it goes down.

    But the effort, the mental churn, the fight to keep going is different now that I’ve moved into middle where the real plot and real works takes more than just a big idea.

  • Baby Steps

    I have a piece of advice that I’m writing mostly for myself here: stop thinking so big. 

    Start small.

    Start with the achievable and work your way up.

    I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

    The big project is simply too overwhelming.

    Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

    Something smaller has to come first.

    In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

    I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

  • Finding Lucky

    It’s Friday the thirteenth of February, and if you grew up anything like I did you were ingrained with the paranormal affluence of this particular date on the calendar in effecting the universe with a particular strain of misfortune and unluckiness.

    I’ve outgrown such superstition, but I can’t help but think about this idea of “luck” now and then, especially so on those random Fridays that happen to evoke a bit of triskaidekaphobia in the lingering echos of my childhood.

    I’ve been told so many times in my life that skills I’ve cultivated, talents I’ve practiced or knowledge I’ve acquired is due to some kind of lucky streak in my life. 

    And maybe there was some luck.

    Because, oh sure, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the privilege of my life, living in a western democracy in the twenty-first century as a European-descended man has played a huge role in the type and frequency of opportunities dangled out in front of me. But any numbskull no matter their privilege—and I’ve known a few—can fumble those opportunities and wind up in a very different creative space, or even completely outside of one.

    Luck played a part, sure, but beyond luck some of that is not only what you make of the cards your have been dealt, the dice you rolled, or the coin you flipped… but what you put back into the system. 

    It’s not luck to work hard towards a goal. It’s not luck to dream big. It’s not luck to share knowledge with others. It’s not luck to build community. It’s not luck to cultivate and to elevate voices. And its not luck to embrace something bigger than yourself and beyond the creative product. It’s more than luck.

    And we should embrace more of that idea and make more of that kind of luck for everyone.