8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 4 – When Nowhere Clicks

From birth to death, we are souls who imagine our worlds and make them real through our actions, but the aging self manifests differently across that span we call life, and what each stage of that life might teach us about making things changes like the seasons.

Chapter List

  • Short Stories Branch · Part Two

    I dug in.

    I figured that challenging myself to write one short story per month would be exactly that: a challenge. And two months and two stories in, I’m finding it to be a comfortable one.

    A few years ago when I set out to write a novel in my newfound state of semi-retirement-slash-unemployment, I spent a couple months world building.  I had a grain of an idea but wanting to focus on a proper character-driven novel in a quasi-science fiction setting, I had long decided I couldn’t just sit down and start writing. No pantsing that. 

    World building can be a whole discipline in itself. One can get too easily lost in fleshing out elaborate imaginary places for your beloved characters to find themselves existing.

    I locked in, though. I built an alternate reality at the edge of my own, fabricated a make-believe city mashed together out of the two places in the world where I spend most of my time, gave it a new name and mixed in a paranormal science-fiction vibe. 

    —then I wrote the better part of three novels there.

    It is within the world of that same city where I have been penning my short stories.

    Short story is a curious art form and so much different than writing a novel, and having a world that is pre-built in my own mind—and previously experienced through a fiction writers eyes in three previous novels—has been immensely helpful. Two or three people encounter something strange and unusual in the mundane day-to-day of life there, and it makes for ready fodder to build an interesting tale.

    I’ve penned two stories so far, have my third queued up, and am getting my head around an editing plan for each. I’ve wrapped this challenge in many things: habit and public accountability, sure, but making it part of my larger project, too. 

    Writing shorter works becomes an act that not only further fleshes out my world for future novels but becomes artifacts in their own right. 

  • Undramatic Scapes Branch · Part Two

    I got some flack the other day from someone who (jokingly, mostly, I’m pretty sure—wink, wink) suggested I shouldn’t post so much on Instagram. This followed an afternoon walk of marathon posting where I took about fifty pictures of the colour splotches of the turning autumn leaves, a kind of abstraction in organic oranges, greens, reds, and browns—then proceeded to post at least a dozen of them one-at-a-time into my feed.

    I shrugged.

    If you don’t like it, don’t follow me, I joked back.

    It was a momentary delve into the undramatically mundane.

    There is nothing wrong with taking glorious photos of magnificent landscapes, but life isn’t all spectacle. Sometimes it’s the dull moments in between, and we’re far too used to only highlighting the best of the best, and forgetting to tap into the everyday. Sometimes we need to seek out the abstractions of colour and shape from normal things and stop getting tangled up in perfection.

    There is beauty in undramatic scapes, or at least I think so: patterns in the autumn leaves, yes, but too footprints in snow or whorls in the clouds or shapes in the bark of a tree or the geometric curiosities of clashing architectural styles. The list is infinite.

    If you aren’t looking at the normal things and seeing beauty, you are missing something in the everyday that can bring you immense joy and creative success.

    Just shoot me, but I want to share some of that vibe.

  • Permission Trap Branch · Part Two

    We’re all frustrated with social media these days, and sometimes the only recourse seems to be to point at anyone even tangentially involved and yell “Stop!”

    That friend who posts a little too much: STOP!

    That coworker who is oversharing: STOP!

    The relative who can’t seem to look at a comment box and walk away: STOP!

    As someone who posts routinely I get my fair share of real life people questioning my participation: it’s not directly telling me I shouldn’t, but it is a subtle dig and a semi-revocation of permission.

    Once, long ago, we all joined these networks and connected to each other in this giant circle of digital trust. I’ll connect to you, we said, but you need to be respectful of that.

    Then the algorithms filled those feeds with advertising and slop and rage bait and memes, and we shrugged and said, well, I can’t yell at Zuckerberg or Musk or any of those assholes, so—

    —so we started revoking permission from our friends. And we almost do it unconsciously: we scroll past the stuff from people we know just like it was part of the rest of the mess, not recalling that the photos and words and stories and messages from the people we connected to were the whole damn reason we downloaded the app to begin with. We ignore them, just the same.

    The result is a great big gap where there was once celebration. There is a quiet rule that social media sucks, but a rule the neglects to differentiate between content from people we know and like, and content that is overwhelmingly corporate, influencer, or algorithmically generated.  

    We lump it all together and shout STOP! But we keep loading the apps—to find only our friends heeded the request. All that is left is the slop. All that is left is the ads. All that is left is the manufactured reality that doesn’t care if you want it or not, and shrugs when you push back. 

    We scolded the wrong creators.

  • Book Guts

    One of the local cafes where I hang out for my morning writing sesh is solid at promoting artists from the neighbourhood. 

    I was ordering my tea and standing beside the cash register were a couple stacks of self-published books for sale, local poets mostly from what I could tell, who had hung out their work with a little sign and a price tag and basically said, hey, “I wrote this… and I live in your community.”

    Maybe that’s my next step, but I will say that it inspired me to do something similar: set up a book stand on my website and offer these words for sale.

    I know I’m going to come across like a bit of self-promotion here, but I think it’s more than that: I’ve been writing away in obscurity for literal decades while simultaneously fearing the big dangling blade of traditional publishing.

    The internet, for all as much as it has sunk into a kind of slop warehouse of inane content, is still filled with more great indie content than I will ever be able to consume in my life. It’s much harder to find in 2026, but it’s there. I’m certain of it.

    My effort at the cafe book drop then comes in the form of code: I whipped up some custom software to convert all these hundreds of posts into something that very much resembles an ebook—and then I dropped it into a page where people might see it there and buy a copy as they are passing through, as much as me saying, hey I wrote this… and I live in your internet community.

    I know it takes guts to put words into something quasi-permanent and then ask someone to pay you for them. I know, because I have spent a long time not having such guts.

    But maybe as I get older and give a few less fucks about the people distracted by fashion reels and shiny influencer slop, those guts are a bit easier to come by.

  • Short Stories Branched · Part One

    As October arrives and I’m just a few short weeks away from turning fifty—five-oh—and of all things to be worried about, I’ve been thinking about my approach to writing fiction.

    I’ve got a half dozen half-written novels stored away on the very computer that I’m writing these words, dangling tales parked on my hard drive and glued in place with countless good intentions to finish each and every one of them.

    Now look, the problem with making some big public proclamation is that there is just as good a chance that I’ll trip and land on my face as cross that distant finish line with my hands triumphantly up in the air. I write for another project all about running, and the thing about running is that it is all about setting out one step at a time and taking each activity, each race, each recovery as it’s own thing—and occasionally you literally do trip and land on your face (or smash into the trunk of a large tree with your shoulder, but that’s another story)—but then you get up and keep running.

    I have a goal for my fifties and it’s something of a marathon of short fiction writing.

    See, all the while that I’ve been accumulating half-written novels, I’ve also been penning an occasional short story. They’ve always been side projects.

    Short stories are not just an important medium in their own right but (going back to that running metaphor) training reps for writing fitness. They train us to think about plots that resolve in a meaningful way. They train us to build daily stamina for nurturing characters. They train us to write good, cohesive fiction.

    So about that goal… Starting in October, my last full month of my forties, I’m going to write and post a single short story. And then I’m gonna write and post another one in November. And another in December… and, well, I’m just going to keep writing a new story every month.

    We’ll try that for a year. 

    And maybe it’ll build a new habit for my fifties. 

    Or maybe I’ll trip and land right on my face. But I gotta try.