8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Inspirations

  • Says Who

    Not many people are going to give you permission to make something… and bluntly, you shouldn’t need it.

    Don’t get me wrong, if it is dangerous or could hurt others—be that financially, morally, physically, or personally—then you should really reconsider your creative efforts.

    But if you are out there wanting to be the one who is creating, making, and sharing, and more so, are yearning for the art of making stuff because it might result in interesting, beautiful or wonderful results, then your permission-seeking mindset might turn out to be an unnecessary barrier holding you back.

    I write about these things, I spill affirmations of this sort, precisely because I have been a permission-seeker my whole life. I am old enough now that (mostly) when I catch myself seeking such permissions I have a stern internal monologue and give myself a good talking to about submitting to those behaviours. But I get it—because that notion digs into you like a relentless infection of spirit and you may never be rid of it. All you can really do it wake up every day and remind yourself that permission will never be given, nor should it even be required.

    And I’m not giving you permission here, though it might very much seem like it. 

    Rather I am writing this to nudge you towards dismissing the very need for it.

  • Thawed Inspiration

    Spring is nigh. And I don’t know what the world looks like where you live, but where I spend my days winter is a bleak, snowy realm that hides the world under a chill blanket whence we await spring and the warmth and the inevitable thaw that comes, too.

    With thaw comes melt, plentiful puddles, and the revelation of all the things that had been covered in snow for months and months reappearing again. Often they are a caked and cruddy, sometimes little more than trash, but occasionally reminding us that there is work to be done in bringing summer to its full glory.

    People far smarter than I have been seeing metaphors in the seasons for long before I arrived and will do so long after I leave, but I will reiterate the point: spring, literal or figurative, is a time of renewal. The world, the mind, the heart, the soul— they all melt eventually and buried under the frozen realm is often surprises of once forgotten things.

    The Blankwraith may be a demon that freezes our creative selves, but even his power is subject to the thaw of inspiration. Even he tires, and ideas emerge from under the snow waiting to be brushed off and dealt with.

  • Eight Clicks

    No one has yet asked, but it’s about time I explained: what’s in a name? What’s in my name, to be exact. 

    I started writing creative fiction under the banner of “8 Clicks from Nowhere” a few years ago. Where it emerged from is not a piece of inspiration that derives meaning or clarity from much anything tangible nor from a deliberate plan. It just is.

    An 8 looks a bit like a B, the first letter of my first name.

    Clicks are webby.

    And if I claimed to be anywhere but the middle of a creative nowhere, I’d be exaggerating.

    Nowhere, you ask?

    I have friends who might eagerly disagree with that sentiment if they thought I was exclusively referring to this physical place. Our city, as much as it would hardly qualify for a shortlist of creative hotspots of the world, is neither a slouch for creative souls. 

    But yet I have often felt a pang of regret that while I live geographically in a place that is just okay for creative collaboration, I definitely live mentally, emotionally, spiritually in a place that is an oasis in a deadly dessert of creative isolation.

    I have long struggled to find a kindred spirit of the kind who might dig deep into the fertile soils of imagination where I tend.

    It is a lonely creative space.

    It has been nothing short of a lifelong state for which I have no clear remedy.

    It is, then, a state of creative existence I have embraced in my techie, webby name, finding myself as I do 8 clicks from nowhere in particular.

  • Autocorrect Coworker

    I went for a walk and decided to use my technology to help me brainstorm ideas.

    I opened up the notes app. I stuck my wireless headphones in my ears. I hit the transcribe button on the little virtual keyboard. And I started walking through the nature-adjacent path. 

    A lot of great ideas wound up in the little digital notepad.

    And then also… a lot of weird broken ideas pulled from the blur of whatever happens when autocorrect meets ambient nature noises meets me failing to articulate my voice while talking to myself in the woods. 

    My phone tended to get my transcription brainstorming session about ninety percent right… and then seemed to hallucinate a few other things it must have thought I might have said.

    One might think that this cause me to be upset, and sure, at first it kind of did.

    But then a strange thing happened. A few—not all, but a few—of the typos and misheard corrections started making sense, and too, muddling serendipitously into interesting ideas. 

    It was nothing revolutionary. No. It was nothing deeply groundbreaking. Yet, somehow—whether is was some algorithm trying to make sense of my rambling ideating or just fortunate murmurings transcribed into something slightly better than gibberish—technology actually did slightly more than I expected when I asked it to help me brainstorm. 

    It became more than just a digital transcriptionist, it weighed in… perhaps accidentally, but also not lacking in value or merit either.

  • Stepped Inspiration

    I’ll be the first to admit that inspiration is not motivation, but one definitely can lead to the other.

    As I write these words I just got back from a long walk. I slipped on my winter shoes, I grabbed my headphones, locked the door behind me and stepped out into the still-snowy paths of a late-February morning. (Yeah, I’m also writing these a week or so ahead of when I post them!) 

    I went out looking for inspiration.

    I had sat down to write something before even deciding to go on a walk and I got stuck. My brain froze up. The Blankwraith crept into my head and froze up my thinker, fingers hovering over the keyboard in empty headed paralysis. 

    But then, simple as it sounds, within five minutes of stepping out the door something loosened up and the ideas started flowing. I’ll write in a future post about the importance of carrying a note-taking tool, but needless to say I opened mine, still within sight of my house, and started jotting.

    My walk lasted an hour. I did a loop around our local suburban neighborhood, trudging through the sloppy, icy sidewalks. And every couple of minutes I would pull out my notes and add another sentence or two to the stack. 

    I counted. I had jotted down thirty-two unique ideas.

    By the time I got home and walked in the door, my biggest concern wasn’t lack of ideas but lack of time to get them turned into little two hundred word essays.

    I went for a walk looking for inspiration and it turns out they were hanging out just down the street.