8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • 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.

  • Warm Ups

    Oh sure, you read this and ask: what the heck? My imposter syndrome flares up like a torn ACL in the middle of a marathon whenever I hit publish on one of these posts.

    All sorts of people are filling blogs, podcasts, video channels, and social media feeds with unsolicited creative insights and rando advice, so much so that when I decide to do something (if nothing else) parallel to that effort it sometimes strikes me as a bit “influencer” —and not in a good way.

    I’ve been writing here routinely for a little more than a month now, tho, and I want to let anyone reading know that if motivations are worth anything at all, I think mine are leaning towards the innocent and genuine.

    I’m not necessarily trying to change your mind, or generate revenue, or glaze clout, or whatever the kids are saying these days. I’m largely using this writing as a warm up, a kind of public morning pages. I’m writing for the sake of writing, and writing metaspective gloops to throw up on a scheduled, deadlined blog is to creativity is as to doing stretches before that aforementioned marathon: not crucial, but a good idea.

    It may feel like I’m jabbering on without any solid bonafides about these topics, but I do think I have something worth saying, imposter syndrome be damned.  And a couple hundred words of jibber jabbering is just what the doctor ordered to my brain limbered up for more important writing.

    Plus, if it turns out to be something useful… it’s already been shared for the benefit of you, too.

  • Healthful

    Three weeks ago I slipped on some neighbourhood icy sidewalks and wrenched a muscle in my back. It hurt for two and a half weeks and I was in enough pain that I had to temporarily suspend my fitness routine. No running. No swimming. Nothing overtly physical beside some gentle stretching and walking.

    What I never considered—until I couldn’t do it anymore—was the impact a physical injury could have on my creative life.

    Sure, I’ve been writing furiously here over that timespan of practice and effort and intention, but a lot of my posts over the last few weeks have been shrouded in an invisible fog of temporary inability to sit at a desk and write for long stretches, physical pain lifting my arms high enough to play my violin, or a blur of frustration about not being able to get out in nature for inspiration and stress relief.

    And maybe this is obvious, but I don’t think we realize how important stable health is for having a creative lifestyle until suddenly we are not healthy anymore, even temporarily. Physical, mental, emotional. All of this is vital to clear the path for making art, playing music, typing words into a keyboard.

    We can adapt, of course, but shifting to new modalities to work around longer term disabilities is the work of months or years, all respect given to those who do it successfully. Mode shifting, on the other hand, is not necessarily a quick jump to be made over a couple days or weeks because one foolishly slipped on the ice. 

  • Undistraction Technology

    I’ve been pondering distraction quite a lot this past week. 

    I spent some reward points and redeemed myself a pair of those new wireless earphones from that fruit company we all love so much. They are the flagship model, too. The stupidly expensive ones for which I never would have paid real money.

    They have me thinking this morning about distraction and the value of being able to focus.

    There are big distractions, huge things that don’t even allow us the freedom of mind to sit down at a keyboard. And there are small distractions, the kind of thing where you are perched ready to work and… the phone rings… or someone decides to have a business meeting about budget allocations at the table three feet away from where you are trying to write paranormal creative science fiction.

    It’s tough to be choosy about your workspace, even when you seem to be in full control of it.

    I have been dabbling in the effectiveness of the noise cancellation features of my new headphones even this morning as I write this. Adding some soft music over the full-on quiet mode has allowed me to focus and pull out of the distractions of what could have been a derailing working environment in a noisier-than-usual cafe I frequent to write in.

    Distraction busted.

    This is not a product endorsement. There are multiple brands and styles of noise cancelling technology, and that might not even be your small distraction du jour, nor the path to a particular solution. But all this is to say that sometimes there is a tool to help you focus, and you don’t even realize it was a distraction until you suddenly have a bit of technology to remove it.

  • Ad Naseum

    I gave my Kid a bit of advice that might have helped her pass her high school English class. It went something like this: when you are writing an essay, first make your point, then make it again, and then loop back around and make it one more time.

    Saying the same thing different ways three times may or not may be some secret formula for high school essays, but it boosted her grades significantly when she started following it.

    That advice didn’t come from nowhere. 

    Saying things on repeat is how we emphasize their importance.

    Repeating the same idea over and over again gives it weight in the mind of the reader.

    Ideas ad naseum might be stylistically clunky, but making multiple passes with the point across the audience, bluntly or otherwise, makes sure that it sticks.

    I bring this up because I have been reading through my past posts on this site and trying to tiptoe around retreading old ground in new writing… but that is probably not a great idea.  

    Avoiding repeating the same idea has a big negative side effect: it assumes that I got it perfectly right the first time I wrote about it. It assumes I have nothing more to say to refine the idea. It assumes that everyone understood it on the first attempt.

    All that is to add, if something you read here seems familiar then maybe that’s on purpose.