8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 6 – Clicking Deeper

And in the end, some will tell you that the only thing that matters is building a self identity and a methodical life around creative expression, putting in the hours, and learning from the effort, that this the true heart of creating stuff. They may have a point.

Chapter List

  • Neon Cities

    I’ve previously mentioned that I recently built a small productivity web app to try to help me be more accountable to myself.

    Productivity is a tricky thing to get right, and making a piece of software to “force it” seems a bit contrived. I went through a half dozen iterations of the idea and ultimately I honed in on a gamified world that thrived when I logged creative practice.

    Writing, drawing, taking pictures, and playing music are logged in small bursts and all of it feeds a little virtual neon city that has enough complexity that it reacts in subtle and curious ways.

    But I find that having a strange gamified abstraction of my creative journey at my fingertips has resulted in me reacting in subtle and curious ways, too.

    An example: I’ve been meaning to improve my urban sketch crowd drawing.

    You know what I mean, right? You sit down to draw some simple, loose urban sketch in a fast-paced moment. You’re scribbling lines and shapes and adding depth and complexity to the architecture and just as you think you’ve got the scene… you look at it one more time only to realize that you’ve drawn around all the people. You’ve left them all out. Urban spaces are cluttered with humans, after all.  So you try and add a few later but—hey—you’re good at drawing buildings not tiny little blobs that look like tourists.  I should try to get better at that, you think.

    I wanted to get better at drawing crowds when I’m out in the world drawing urban scenes.

    I could have probably approached this a hundred ways, but inside this little productivity city that I built something random happened: I was offered a job. I mean, that’s normal—that’s what the system does. It prompts you to practice your skills by randomly dropping jobs. What was weird was that the first job it picked for me after I added my disciplines into the system was “figure drawing.”

    So I did some figure drawing, and I logged it.

    And then I did some more. 

    And then I decided to add a “project” to draw one thousand little figures before the end of the year. Suddenly, I find myself sitting in front of the television sketching little people over and over and over for long stretches—getting better and better at drawing crowds of urban sketchy people.

    Productivity is subtle, and I don’t know yet if this counts as productivity. But it feels like an interesting thing to wander a virtual world and see what is around the next corner, particularly if it’s leading me somewhere I want to go.

  • Distractedly Entertained

    Technology has supplanted boredom.

    I’d love to pry that phone out the Kid’s hands some day, lock it in a box, and tell her that she’s got it mixed up. She razzed me the other day because I was vibe coding. She literally shouted in my face that I shouldn’t be using AI. “Dad! That stuff is evil.”

    I shook my head and kept my cool and told her that security checking my web code through Claude for hacking vulnerabilities was not the same as generating slop in a chatbot. Both AI, sure, but different realms.

    And besides, I thought later as I was out for a walk alone (exercising the dog and daydreaming up my next article) you have your face plugged into a phone screen ninety-five percent of the day. Creativity is not going to bubble magically through that device and make you a better human, is it?

    Grumpy old man could shake his fist in the air and shout “oh, the kids these days…” but it’s not just the kids, is it?

    When was the last time you left your phone in a different room—and the outside the bathroom door is not good enough of an answer, though that’s getting rarer and rarer too if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

    Boredom is the heart of my personal creativity.

    Boredom—when I turn off the screen, leave out the headphones, walk without conversation, run without headphones, sit without a television, lay in the grass without a book or a game—that’s when the good stuff flows.

    We’re all increasingly distracted by entertainment and technology is a garden of distraction.

    What hope does boredom have in the face of unlimited options to consume our minds. What hope does human creativity have at the loss of true boredom.

    This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Potency Peace

    The final chapter of this writing project needed something conclusive to say.

    As this post goes live, this collection has over two hundred entries about creativity and the creative journey. Some are pretty vapid, some others are so introspectively deep I honestly don’t know how I found the words.

    I think I can take a guess, though: flow and presence. Perseverance. And the rhythm of a project that goes on and on and on for, in this case, the better part of a year of near-daily writing.

    It’s been a long road so far and, as I pen the last formal explanation of my long list of chapters in this collection, it strikes me that I’ve probably found more from the effort of making it, writing, promoting it, and refining it over the last ten months as I suspect any other person will ever extract from it for themselves.

    That is the final lesson, I guess: that when everything else falls away and you just find the moments when creativity and inspiration and motivation collide… well, interesting things do happen. The effort of just trying is worth it. There is a fluidity of thought that emerges from a mind that gets into a pattern of creativity, sets out on an adventure to make something big and impossible, and does the work.

    There are nearly thirty chapters in this collection and they bounce across the spectrum of creative philosophizing, dabbling in the nuance of self to the perception of others past the complexity of commercial value and span the years of our lives as creators of things. I’ve dabbled in trying to explain each of them, and now we come to the last of it: what happens when we just find peace in what we are doing and let that be enough?

    This may be the last in a long list of explanatory posts but under the category of Potency & Peace I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Forked Up

    I have a whole topic on this project where I write about iteration, so it should come as no surprise that I wrote a plugin for WordPress (upon which the website for this collection is hosted) to support something I call “transparent iteration” in what I write.

    I call the plugin “Forkposter” and it does a complex task for a very simple idea: versions.

    I borrowed the notion from code, which as a software development guy is a topic that comes up even in the commercial naming of products. Such and such version three point one or Phone OS Eleventeen. 

    I have started doing something similar with essays I write here: and it all starts from the assumption that ideas change and grow.

    Forkposter allows me to “branch” an essay, which is to say turn it into a “part one” and then write parts two, three, four… etc. It also allows me to “fork” an essay, which keeps version one in the feed but then publishes a new, updated and revised version (I make the revisions, obviously, rewriting and expanding on the original) while that original stays in the feed and points aggressively at the updated copy.

    You’ve probably started seeing little “branch” and “version” badges on some of my posts, because I actually found I very much like this idea of iterating on old posts and old ideas (now that the project is nearly a year old there are a lot of those) and fleshing out things as I’ve thought about it more and written more on tangential topics.

    Iteration is not always about step-by-step growing outward, but sometimes it is just as much about retracing heavier lines over the things you want to get right and make stand out.

    That kind of transparency isn’t for everyone, but I think it suits a writing project like this, demonstrating in real time that none of this is written in stone, and rethinking, revising, and revisiting is not just a good idea but it can be one that’s baked into the machine, too.

  • Fail Flail

    I’ve been thinking a lot about flailing about in the throes of a personal project lately.

    I’ve spent a lot of years seeking some kind of creative destination. In my head it has always been a place I was going and, blah blah blah we all know the real lesson in life is that the journey is often more important. It’s a cliché by this point, print it on a wooden board and hang it in your kitchen.

    We’re a little less clear on what that journey looks like, and if you were to ask an average person what such a creative adventure might look like I suspect you would get an answer that was romantic and filled with joyous struggle and teetering on the edge of cinematic.

    The creative journey is rarely that: it’s more often stumbling through an unmarked trail, sloshing through the muck, swatting mosquitoes and not just losing your map but realizing you were following the wrong one from the outset. It is rife with zero bars of cell coverage. It is forgetting the sunscreen and an umbrella and needing both. It is hearing the rustle of wild animals just out of sight and never quite knowing if it is a harmless squirrel or a hungry bear.

    Creativity is flailing and failing over and over, and possibly never reaching a destination, but experiencing the adventure—and loving that you set out upon it. I am lost out here with you all and under the category of Fail & Flail I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.