8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 4 – When Nowhere Clicks

The aging self and what each stage of life might teach us about making things. The life of creating stuff.

Chapter List

  • Autocorrect Coworker

    I went for a walk and decided to use my technology to help me brainstorm ideas.

    I opened up the notes app. I stuck my wireless headphones in my ears. I hit the transcribe button on the little virtual keyboard. And I started walking through the nature-adjacent path. 

    A lot of great ideas wound up in the little digital notepad.

    And then also… a lot of weird broken ideas pulled from the blur of whatever happens when autocorrect meets ambient nature noises meets me failing to articulate my voice while talking to myself in the woods. 

    My phone tended to get my transcription brainstorming session about ninety percent right… and then seemed to hallucinate a few other things it must have thought I might have said.

    One might think that this cause me to be upset, and sure, at first it kind of did.

    But then a strange thing happened. A few—not all, but a few—of the typos and misheard corrections started making sense, and too, muddling serendipitously into interesting ideas. 

    It was nothing revolutionary. No. It was nothing deeply groundbreaking. Yet, somehow—whether is was some algorithm trying to make sense of my rambling ideating or just fortunate murmurings transcribed into something slightly better than gibberish—technology actually did slightly more than I expected when I asked it to help me brainstorm. 

    It became more than just a digital transcriptionist, it weighed in… perhaps accidentally, but also not lacking in value or merit either.

  • Amateur Appeal 

    I recently wrote a piece on this blog about breaking from the conformity of rules when we create, suggesting in my two-hundred word blog-conforming limit that stepping outside of the guardrails presented by this idea of your art needing to be so-called “commercial viable” might be a means to escape from a constraint imposed on your feeling of accomplishment and ability.

    I was thinking about this in a different context: the amateur effect.

    That is to say, sometimes amateurs create things that break rules not because they want to break away from constraints of the form, and also not because they are unencumbered by a debt to the patronage of a person or system that limits professionals, but rather, simply because they simply haven’t internalized those same rules that might otherwise limit them. They break rules because they didn’t know they existed, and occasionally stumble upon something worth considering through that process.

    It is, of course, far from given that amateurs can de facto make interesting contributions to an art just because they are new to the craft, and even if we could, it could also be argued that accidental creation is neither consistency nor necessarily something to be proud of.

    But it is interesting, the notion that I might take up a new hobby in a style of music, or mode of painting, or craft of prose and by virtue of accident make something not just reasonably good, but rule-bending enough for someone better at the effort to consider their cherished rules and skills as something that can, on occasion, be bent a little bit.

  • Podcast Guy

    I need to inform you that by the time you read this I will be a podcast guy.

    Ugh. One of those, huh?

    My excuse is such: in early February I embraced a few big ideas that manifested as a spoken audio project, which very much looks and acts like a podcast at the moment.

    Big ideas, you ask?

    First, I have been playing with sound, music, recording, and an array of other tools and toys that are burning a hole in my soul looking for a purpose. 

    Second, I looked at the conformity of what I should be doing and making as a so-called commercially viable product and said to hell with that, I just want to make what I want to make.

    Third, I realized, and you may have seen me write about this a few times already, that stepping away from posting and participating doesn’t make the terrible stuff go away, it just leaves a gap that is destined to be filled with political, vapid, or algorithmic slop.

    In other words, I was motivated to step up and start making more, posting more, and participating, but in a way that suited me. The result so far has been me dabbling in a new podcast-like project, and likely one that will not sound like nor look like the hundred other podcasts in your feed. 

    …or, so I hope.

    Big ideas, small project, and a vast shift towards a new perspective… and if nothing else, you can listen to me now, too.

  • Health Full

    Three weeks ago I slipped on some neighbourhood icy sidewalks and wrenched a muscle in my back. It hurt for two and a half weeks and I was in enough pain that I had to temporarily suspend my fitness routine. No running. No swimming. Nothing overtly physical beside some gentle stretching and walking.

    What I never considered—until I couldn’t do it anymore—was the impact a physical injury could have on my creative life.

    Sure, I’ve been writing furiously here over that timespan of practice and effort and intention, but a lot of my posts over the last few weeks have been shrouded in an invisible fog of temporary inability to sit at a desk and write for long stretches, physical pain lifting my arms high enough to play my violin, or a blur of frustration about not being able to get out in nature for inspiration and stress relief.

    And maybe this is obvious, but I don’t think we realize how important stable health is for having a creative lifestyle until suddenly we are not healthy anymore, even temporarily. Physical, mental, emotional. All of this is vital to clear the path for making art, playing music, typing words into a keyboard.

    We can adapt, of course, but shifting to new modalities to work around longer term disabilities is the work of months or years, all respect given to those who do it successfully. Mode shifting, on the other hand, is not necessarily a quick jump to be made over a couple days or weeks because one foolishly slipped on the ice. 

  • 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.