8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Productivity Obsession

    I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

    I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

    This afternoon I vibe coded an app for my Mac that (for now) emulates the key features of the popular and once-trendy bullet journal but in a task list-meets-log sort of way. Maybe I’ll even use it… for a while.

    Does any of it actually work tho?

    I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have it to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that matter at the end of the day.

  • Derailed

    To say it is easy for a creative person to get derailed in the span of any given day is almost not worth saying, it is so obvious. Stephen Pressfield in his wonderful little book The War of Art, a must read for any creative soul, calls this a kind of resistance.

    Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

    Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

    I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

    And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

    It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.

  • Reading Lesson

    I spent multiple hours this past weekend reading aloud.

    Call it practice.

    Call it production.

    Whatever it is, it was me attempting to create something from a skill that has never really been in my wheelhouse: reading aloud.

    Like any new-ish or re-visited skill that needs polishing, I have found that the best thing to do is just to do it… and be open to self-reflecting on the effort.

    Asking yourself: How can I make this better?

    Fighting the urge to doubt that progress is being made or to quit outright.

    I felt both, but I persevered and gave myself an impromptu reading lesson, all while building the pieces of a project that I’m excited to move incrementally forward.

  • Passable Performance

    Voice acting is never something I was ever trained to do.

    My Kid (who I’ve mentioned is a theatre student) famously jibes me because the only stage performance I have ever done was in the fourth grade where I was a winkie in an elementary production of The Wizard of Oz. I had one line, and we put on a single show.

    I have been working on a project to “dramatically read” my novel and post it as a mid-production podcast, chapter by chapter.

    Now, you say, why not get your daughter to read some of it? And you’d be right in suggesting it, but the truth is that working on this thing is as much for my own edification as it is about the final product.

    So—what is a guy who’s never acted (but who has decided to act out an entire novel) to do?

    Like anything and everything, I am a strong believer in the idea that anyone can do pretty much anything (well… maybe not perfectly, but certainly passably) with practice, practice, practice. Wy shouldn’t dramatic reading of a novel be any different?

    To that end I’ve been practicing. I’ve read the first chapter of my novel into a microphone at least twenty times now, and each time I seem to find a tiny way to make it a little more interesting, bring a bit more depth to my performance, and kinda do something I was never ever trained to do.

  • Morning Vibes

    The ritual of the commute may not spark other folks like it sparked me, but having become a guy who largely works from home—be that on my own projects or on contract work—I have started to understand not just the value, but the need to have a morning groove.

    (As an aside, it hasn’t helped my routine that I also gave up coffee a couple months ago—for health reasons.)

    Without ritual, without pattern, without routine I often find that my day struggles to really start. I’ll sit in a cozy chair in my pyjamas (really) and at some point look up and it will be nine-thirty, and though I’ve poked around on some files or done some pre-work, my day feels decidedly unstarted.

    On the other hand, if I plan to be out the door and sitting in a cafe by 8am with a hot drink in front of me and my laptop open to a word processor, then by nine-thirty I’ve often already written something, posted something, or at least made progress on a project of some sort.

    The difference is stark, and all that accounts for it is the routine of a morning plan.