8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 3 – Clicking In

  • Ad Free

    Unless you are particularly sour to such things, you may have noticed that something is lacking on this project: Advertising.

    There are no popups. There is no paywall. There are no subscriptions or memberships or signups. There are no requests for donations or me begging for money (and no, this is not one of them.) It is not an oversight or a bait-and-switch or a free trial until I get bigger and need revenue. 

    It’s purposeful. It’s philosophical. Probably a little privileged, sure, but it’s what I believe is right for at least some of the work I make.

    It’s not that I haven’t and don’t elsewhere dabble in trying to earn some side cash from my online projects. I’m not independently wealthy or above paying basic bills. Monetization was my mild obsession for a while, actually, to offset costs. But I can tell you the two big things that side-hustle culture doesn’t easily result in for me: cash flow and happiness.

    We have been deceived into believing that everything we make, every word we write, every note we play, every photo we take, every art we create, and every word we utter should be part of a brand, a pitch, our creative time building to some kind of passive income fever dream of pretend financial freedom.

    But it doesn’t always need to. Shouldn’t always need to.

    And I should not need to explain that. I shouldn’t need to justify creating and sharing a thing like this site for the simple joy of it. I shouldn’t need to make an excuse for giving these words out for free because it makes me happy to write them, record them, and post them.

    Making stuff for the sake of simply making it can be an important kind of intrinsic compensation, too.

  • Creative Positive

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

    Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

    But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

    It is not our jobs to join the rage.

    It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

    It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

    The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

    Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.

  • 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.

  • Drive-by Storytelling

    My kid, who is technically an adult studying theatre and literature at University, was chatting over the weekend about story design.

    “I don’t ever know when to start a story.” She said. “Like, do you write from the beginning or jump into the action, or—”

    Look, I’m no expert but I can tell you that such things are a combination a lot of other things: two of the big ones being personal style and confidence in the reader.

    I write my stories in a way that I usually think of as drive by storytelling.

    The reader doesn’t go to the story, listen to the whole tale, then drive away when it’s finished.

    Rather, they drive by: the story is happening and they hear a piece of it as they “drive by” and then keep going while the story keeps happening in the rearview mirror. 

    To clarify, I do focus on writing the important nuggets of the tale being told and not random, meaningless chunks.

    But by working in this model I tend to write in a way that focuses my personal style on having confidence that the reader will understand enough of what happened before they got there and enough of what will continue to go on after they pass by.

  • Doodling Inspiration

    A huge part of my creative process as I work on a new novel has been sketching.

    I assume lots of authors, the kind who are also meticulous planners, make notes. I make notes, too, but I have also been using a form of visual note taking. 

    It works like this.

    I open up the next blank spread in my sketchbook, I write the chapter name somewhere central on the page, and then I start sketching out something that is a cross between a vision board and an idea chart on that page. I include sketches of characters introduced in that chapter. I sketch out objects that make appearances in the scene. I sketch the facade of the building or the stuff hanging on the walls or the grove of trees that I think I might want to mention somewhere in the story. 

    The result is that as I then go to write the chapter itself, I have not just my plan and the words that describe what I plan to write about, but I also have this rough collection of doodles and drawings that spark more connections and drive my writing forward.

    I can’t tell you how well it will ultimately work for me because it is a new thing I am trying, but so far it seems to be inking out strong inspiration every day.