8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [28] Fail & Flail

Embracing failure, imperfection, and the happy accidents of trying something new.

Chapter List

  • Those Walls

    Let me walk you through the door I found in the wall that had been blocking my path.

    I spent the early part of 2025 building the foundations of a computer game. Code. Art. Story. All the bits strung together into a few megabytes of raw materials that I can compile into a simulation-slash-cozy gamer’s curiosity.

    But yeah. I hit a wall. 

    See, building a game is the work of a hundred different skillsets mingling together into just the right blend. A proper game studio would have specialists who focus on each niche skill. A proper game studio would have project managers who coordinate the timing. A proper game studio would have deadlines nudging their team forward.

    I had me.

    I am not a specialist.

    I am managing my own project.

    My deadlines are ethereal.

    So a wall, even a metaphorical one, spells trouble.

    The details of said wall are not important.  What is important is that walls can be impenetrable and project-ending failure points.  They often are.  And sometimes, often I would argue, creatives run into a wall that they don’t even realize was a wall at all.

    We can then do one of two things. We can give up—and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s the right answer. If the wall is insurmountable, spending the rest of our lives looking for a way over or through it may be a terrible idea.

    On the other hand we can look for a gap, a door, a foothold to climb over, or the place where the wall has crumbled from the efforts of someone who went before and…

    Well. That’s what I did with my game development work.

    Thus I march on, scanning the horizon for the next obstacle for surely there are many more ahead.

  • Advice Less

    You may have found this blog project and be thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

    There’s not really much advice here, you might be thinking.

    You’re not wrong, but you’re not right.

    This was never intended to be a manual about being a creative person. No. Not at all. It was meant to be a collection of thoughts on the accidental nature of creativity. I have no solid advice. I have no lists of skills to check off on your way towards success.  I have no morals or lessons or cautionary tales with polished insights at the end.

    This is a fumbling, imperfect exercise in abstraction. It is an daily exercise in being lost on a path that is as much about the journey as it is about a destination. Imperfection is the goal.

    You want a lesson?

    Fail more. Because it means you tried something and maybe learned.

    Embrace different. Because it might be the only way to stand out in a crowd.

    Close your eyes and ignore all the other advice. Because copying is what machines do and the humanity of creativity is something that might not be teachable so much as felt, gleaned, experienced, caught, or whatever.

    You’re not wrong. There isn’t much advice here, just a few notes from the last guy to wander this path and never really find his way out.

  • Pinch Poster

    This is not the post I had intended to drop here today.

    I’ve been keeping about a week and a half ahead of my schedule these days, writing posts, getting them queued up on the back end of the blog, giving myself both breathing room and time to go back over and revise stuff I’ve written before it goes live.

    And about two weeks ago I started a whole new series. It was going to be about a bunch of big projects I was going to tackle, and write big multi-part articles about.

    I wrote an introduction post that was supposed to go out instead of this post.

    It fumbled and flopped before it even launched. I was struggling getting the actual project done in the middle of writing all about how great it was going. [Slowly pulls back curtain and…]

    In this case, I realized that committing to the time to do the project itself was just out of the realm of reasonability as summer arrives and things get busier around our house. 

    I accept failure as a natural part of working on big ideas. Not everything is going to take and sometimes—like this past week—you’re going to find that you’ve bit off a bit more than you can chew on. Take the L and move on.

  • Great Wall

    I am just as tempted as anyone to aim for greatness when I try to create anything. 

    So often, I will throw everything against the metaphorical wall and assume that something should stick. It is a slick wall, though. Sticking anything is tough enough, but sticking everything is nigh impossible. 

    Greatness, in my opinion is not something that comes from the instant success of anything. It does not emerge whole cloth from the engine. It does not top the bestseller list on a first draft. It does not rocket up the charts as if gravity has no bearing on it. It does not immediately stick to the wall fully formed.

    Greatness is earned.

    Greatness is the work of countless attempts, even though most of those attempts will only be witnessed by you and often worse-than-ignored by others; scorned or mocked, or rejected with passionless impunity.  

    Greatness is beset by setbacks and slippery walls.

    I always aim for that great wall. 

    And yet I have learned that it is out there, probably lurking in a shadow, avoiding being found. Avoiding the light. Avoiding the ease by which we assume it has been discovered and stuck. Slippery.

    We see success all the time. We see it in other people having achieved it through their own efforts and so we likely assume they took their shot and caught it with only a trivial bit of work—and almost certainly we are wrong. We didn’t see the shards of countless failed attempts heaped on the floor below. We never do.

  • Slow Down

    I spent nearly three hours this morning working on recording audio for my project and the end result of all that work is what probably amounts to only about three minutes of usable audio.

    Let me back up.

    I am working on a new novel, and a side-project part of that effort has me attempting to translate it from the written word stuck inside a word processor on my computer into an audiobook-style production with some bespoke tunes and sound effects.

    I have a solid microphone setup with a pre-amp, hardware digital recorder, digital synths, effects pedals and wires going in twelve different directions.

    But it turns out after all the work I did to write a story and set up a technology jungle to set my voice into sound waves in file on my hard drive, what I needed most was practice reading at a practiced pace suitable for storytelling.

    Who would have thought, huh?

    When I figured out how to read slowly, enunciating each word, the results were oh so much better.