8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Jubilant July

Chapter List

  • 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?

  • Afternoon Nap

    Maybe it’s getting older (or maybe it’s because I gave up caffeine six months ago) but I find my batteries drain shortly after lunch and a thirty minute nap is in order.

    I admit it. I’m going to be fifty this year. Yikes.

    (Not that you couldn’t tell from guy still writing a blog in twenty-twenty six, but  I ain’t a teenager anymore.)

    I spend a good chunk of my mornings working on creative brain work, getting the important stuff off my plate, and being all professional. 

    Then I eat a (usually) healthy lunch.

    And by one-thirty. Ugh. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open.  If life allows, I’ll close the lid of the computer and close my eyes, too. 

    I suppose it’s a universal truth of a sort, but if you can swing a nap to recharge your batteries in the middle of the day then do it. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t begrudge the sleepyheads. Don’t frown at someone who can use an extra half hour of rest. 

    Sleep is not wasted time. It is how our brains rejuvenate. 

    I always knew I’d get older some day. Heck, as they say, aging is a privilege and a monument to surviving this crazy universe.  And if I can experience it a little more clearly after a few extra winks then all the better, right?

  • Reality Thirst

    As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.

    I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my blog, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.

    As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) blog project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.

    Viral is the wrong word. 

    But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.

    Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly. 

    And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures. 

    It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original. 

    People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.

    This post was original posted on of poets & processors.

  • Social Community

    We’ve been watching one of those reality competition shows where a group of artists in an eclectic field are brought together to participate in a multi-episode grind where every nuance of their niche artistic talents are tested. 

    You’ve seen these: glass blowers, knife forgers, puppet makers, miniature modellers. The formula is usually the same: artists, judges, tears and hugs.

    Yet I’ve often found the particulars of the art itself are less interesting than the side effect of bringing together a group of people with a shared interest. As much as the production demands of the show oft only glimpse at it, a keen eye can often spot that these people sometimes seem more torn about losing and being cast off one at a time per episode not because of the money, but because they are being torn out of a community.

    Social media is a pale substitute to gathering with your artistic peers, I would argue. It can help find your tribe, sure, but there is something irreplaceable about the collaborative energy of a crowd and the erasure of the usual loneliness of a being a creative soul.

    Not everyone need apply for the next reality television production, but seeking and nurturing an artistic social life is arguably almost as important as learning and practicing one’s art.

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