8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [15] Young & Restless

The early days and joy of learning something new and why it so often fades and hides.

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?

  • Fading Maths

    It would be easy to blame a lack of attention, or a clinical disorder of the same, but taking on a new hobby or creative skill and watching the shininess of it fade quickly is not a disorder of self, it’s just the math of progression.

    Maybe you have just taken up study of a new instrument or have picked up the supplies to tackle an artistic medium you’ve never before dabbled in.

    Your first attempt to create is going to be one hundred percent new progress.

    Your second attempt is going to build on that newness, so it will not be all new, but there is still so much to learn.

    Your third, fourth, fifth and so on for the first dozen explorations of your new interest will yield progressively less new growth, but still represent a lot of new.

    But then eventually (and soon) the newness will plateau. It will seem for all the effort you are putting in you are barely experiencing anything new, barely growing, barely learning. (Even if you are, in truth.) 

    And there’s the root of the equation. Our brains like the newness. We are rewarded with a hit of dopamine, a feel-good moment of joy for experiencing something novel, and those hits come with decreasing frequency as we move from being a beginner in the early stages into a student practicing yet-to-be-honed talents. 

    The math isn’t on our side. So we need to calculate a way to keep our interest and push through towards mastery.

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Passable Performance

    Voice acting is never something I was ever trained to do.

    My Kid (who I’ve mentioned is a theatre student) famously jibes me because the only stage performance I have ever done was in the fourth grade where I was a winkie in an elementary production of The Wizard of Oz. I had one line, and we put on a single show.

    I have been working on a project to “dramatically read” my novel and post it as a mid-production podcast, chapter by chapter.

    Now, you say, why not get your daughter to read some of it? And you’d be right in suggesting it, but the truth is that working on this thing is as much for my own edification as it is about the final product.

    So—what is a guy who’s never acted (but who has decided to act out an entire novel) to do?

    Like anything and everything, I am a strong believer in the idea that anyone can do pretty much anything (well… maybe not perfectly, but certainly passably) with practice, practice, practice. Wy shouldn’t dramatic reading of a novel be any different?

    To that end I’ve been practicing. I’ve read the first chapter of my novel into a microphone at least twenty times now, and each time I seem to find a tiny way to make it a little more interesting, bring a bit more depth to my performance, and kinda do something I was never ever trained to do.