8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [05] Food & Shelter

The myth of the starving artist and other lies we seem to tell ourselves.

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.

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • Blind Collapse

    I have a blind spot. Do you?

    I catastrophize.

    Imagine the worst possible outcome: the worst reaction from a client, the worst feedback from a reader, or the worst review from a customer. Imagine failure not just as a setback but as a liability to reputation or personal welfare. 

    It can paralyze. 

    It can freeze momentum into regression.

    I wanted to write on this site a little more about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories we make up in our own heads, and the demons that haunt our efforts to hold us back.

    We all have them.

    One of mine is overthinking the worst of it. Those notions swirl around in my brain, often keeping me up in the middle of the night or causing me to sit and stare at the screen during those precious moments I could be writing. It snowballs into narratives that play out as conversations in my own head where I debate and explain and justify—none of it with any value to the work.

    The feedback loop would be much worse if I didn’t have strategies to cope with it: my personal counter-attack is math. Some little corner of my brain is a bookie for the odds and reminds the catastrophizing majority that the probabilities for the worst outcome are in my favour for a good result.  (That bookie, though, he takes long naps and only really wakes up when things are spiralling.)

    All that is to say: we each of us have blind spots, and acknowledging them might just be the first step in overcoming them.

  • Food Shelter

    Certainly among the most well known of the Delphic maxims of Greek philosophical origins[1] is the command to “know thyself” and in such understand one’s own limitations and role in the world.

    It is not particularly surprising then that I might choose to devote a substantial part of this writing project to the idea of personal understanding and in particular getting our own heads around personal honesty.  There are, after all, a great many myths we build up around our own narratives, lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, that are just as like to be limitations we unnecessarily tangle into our heads that quickly become powerful barriers to even the simplest acts of creativity.

    To know thyself is to accept the worst of ourselves as well as the best.

    To know thyself is to face the demon as well as entertaining the muse.

    And to deny that already before me a million books and blogs and podcasts have already spent time and ink and data on these topics would be a fools errand. 

    Do I have something unique to contribute, or am I even in that fooling myself about my own role in this conversation?

    I might suggest that this is but the first myth I can tear down: we all have perspectives that may retread common ground but are seen through a set of eyes, heard through a pair of ears, sensed by our personal neurons and it is just as important to know ourselves through this effort as to simply absorb the perceptions of others. As important as the basics of life to a creative soul.

    Under the category of Food & Shelter, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.