8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 2 – Nowhere but Everywhere

Who is the creative professional and what does it mean to create at and for work, pay, and career? The work of creating of is more than a job, but rather it can form the foundation of how we work, why we work and the purpose we find in pursuit of making interesting stuff as we contribute to a complex society.

Chapter List

  • Mirrored Myths

    I was listening to a film review podcast the other day. They were discussing a film I’ve watched probably at least a dozen times: Spirited Away.[1]

    I love that film. It was my introduction to Japanese animation. I saw it in the theatre when it was released in Canada in 2001 and bought a copy when it came out on DVD. When we went to Japan in 2025 we visited Ghibli Park just outside of Nagoya and my single souvenir from that place was a copy of the Japanese-language version of manga book of Spirited Away.

    The film reviewers had just watched it and were discussing (as film podcasters are wont to do) the themes but their interpretation was miles off from what I got from the film.

    What they thought versus what I thought was neither here nor there: that’s not the point.

    Rather, it was a reminder that good art—and anyone who says Spirited Away is anything other than good art I will fight you on that—reflects ourselves back at us.

    Their interpretation was so different from mine because they valued different things in themselves, and saw the trials and lessons of the protagonist through the lens of their own personal value system.  Good art is open to a million interpretations, and likely anyone who watches Spirited Away—or looked upon a brilliant oil painting, listened to a wonderful piece of music, or read a well-written novel—would see something important of themselves reflected back.

    They were not wrong about how they saw the film, but rather went through something of a transparent psychological analysis in telling their listeners what they saw in the mirror of the film.

    We often tell stories to the world about ourselves and about who we think we are as we face outwards, but sometimes we can’t escape from the reflections.

  • Hard Change Branch · Part Three

    Change is hard.

    I left my government job over three years ago and I still sputter out excuses when I cross paths with someone who questions the narrative. No one can understand why. No one can make sense of decoupling from a career out of free will.

    An interaction usually goes something like this:

    Oh, hey—how are you? What are you up to these days—still with… We worked together or we knew each other professionally and the only thing we had in common was our ties to that job.

    No. I’ve been gone for years now. You?

    No. I’m with… they say some name of some company I’m unlikely to remember later… what are you doing then?

    Here, I should interject and say—Woohoo! I’ve realized a dream. I spend my days writing and making and exploring. I wrote a novel and I’m writing short stories nearly every day and I’m posting prolifically on a couple of websites. I get involved in the community. I spend time with my family. The ladies who sell me tea the cafe know me by name. I’m splendidly happy with my lot—how is corporate life going?

    I don’t.

    Oh, you know—I do some contract work here and there. It’s not a lie. I do. Trying to start my own little business and it’s slow going.

    That sounds amazing. Does it really?

    I make a bit more small talk and it never goes back to anything of substance. No one cares—in the best ways and the worst, no one cares that you leapt from the moving train of your career and are wandering in the wilderness trying to find meaning. And that’s fine. No one needs to care.

    But then that’s the problem: Change is hard, and too often I find myself making excuses for why my change has been so fuzzy rather than just admitting that change is amazing, too.

  • Productivity Obsession Updated · v2

    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.

    In October I coded a new app to take another swing at the “productivity tool” challenge.

    Past attempts have been simple task tracking apps with checklists and goals.

    This latest attempt has been a behemoth of curiosity and complexity: it posits an imagined futuristic city inhabited by a creative underground market where skills are traded and jobs are posted. The more creative work one logs in the system the more the city grows and the more interesting things are unlocked.

    My proudest achievement is that the imagined city has a radio station that plays lo-fi tunes in the background while I work, encouraging me to have the app open on my computer for easy logging.

    It’s immensely cool and I’m having so much fun exploring the little novelty, but…

    Does any of it actually work to make me more productive?

    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, checklists, logs and databases no matter their format, are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have accountability 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 actually matter at the end of the day.

  • Charred Black

    Winter is coming. Literally.

    I just passed the two hundred post milestone on this writing project, and it has come a long way since I started with a big idea and a handful of introductory posts back in the deeps of last winter. And here we come again.

    Summer was a time of rejuvenation and new ideas, and I spent a lot of the time behind the scenes expanding out the scope of what I was trying to do here, adding features to the website, creating offline “book” versions of my content, and injecting a ton of metadata into the posts that interlink, expand, and clarify the things that I am sharing as nuggets of personal insight.

    It is my personal search for purpose. It feels that way sometimes.

    I came from a realm of professional burnout. I gave the legendary one hundred and ten percent to my various jobs for about twenty-five years, which by my math puts me about two hundred and fifty percent in the black.

    But that black isn’t an asset. It was char. And about a month or so after writing this I’ll be turning fifty—five-oh—and while that certainly isn’t my personal winter, it definitely feels a lot like autumn.

    I take comfort in knowing that I’ve been a bit of an autumn person my whole life, tho, so perhaps this work, this project, this writing, and whatever clarity has tumbled from the effort to over-philosophize and hyper-analyze my own creative soul has marked a seasonal transition.

    I can’t necessarily tell you how to find your own meaning, but wrapping your head around where you’ve been through introspection, writing and refocus has definitely started working some magic on me.

    Hunker down, the weather is about to shift.

  • Store Front

    Unless you’ve dived deep into these writings you may be blissfully unaware that I am doing (and posting) a lot of words.  I’ve written about writing at various points through this project, from explaining about this website, to name dropping my other parallel projects, to lamenting my struggles with trying to get my fiction into a state of something bigger than some scribbled drafts. Whatever you’ve read, it’s probably not half of the story, but all you need to know is that I’ve been putting words on paper (digital paper, ahem) without break since leaving my government job, and that has been going on three and half years now.

    Phew!

    And with all that sitting in drives and database archives and files and all over the place, I had an idea and the inclination to do something with it.

    I built a digital publication studio… which is not really all that much to do in the modern internet: a couple plugins, more words, some imagery, a payment gateway and a storefront.

    As you are reading this, my shop has been online for a couple days.

    Now look, I’ve committed multiple times in things I’ve written to not advertising on these sites. But when I write that what I mean to tell you is that I’m not going to pepper this site with third party click ads or do sponsored posts or dive into corporate collaborations.

    On the other hand, every creative maker needs a way to sell their own wares.

    My wares are words.  My products have for a long time been (free) websites that are not cluttered with paywalls or ad breaks or spammy experiences.

    To supplement that I decided (like any responsible creative) I should turn those free sites (still now and forever free) into something with a bit of added value. My storefront will start to have a collection of anthologies in PDF or DRM-free ePub formats so that you can download larger collections of posts to read offline, in a more coherent order, and will be yours to own forever.

    So I lied. One advertisement is coming to this site: the occasional nudging reminder that you can support me and my sites by buying a digital download of my work. It’s the dirty side of creativity, but—and I’ve written this over and over, you can download an anthology and check—what’s the point of making stuff if no one ever sees it?