8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 6 – Clicking Deeper

  • Month Incremental

    So, yeah. It’s been a month. Can you believe it?

    Oh, right. I didn’t mention it before today.

    Thing is, I haven’t really been promoting or sharing this blog yet as I built up something of both a back-catalogue of posts and some project momentum, but I thought it worth calling out that after one month of posting every weekday I have… tada! One month worth of posts!

    If you keep reading, you will learn one big theme from me: I am a big proponent of a common idea called incrementalism, the notion that big things don’t happen all at once, but rather by chipping away at a problem with steadfast effort and persistence.

    Writing a little bit each day.

    Mastering a new talent by honing one new skill at a time. 

    Practice, repetition, and patience. 

    Incrementally, bit by bit, line by line, word by word, anything can be done. Well, probably anything… within reason, y’know.

    The steady drip of water can wear away a stone after a long enough time. A person can wear away at a problem with the same incremental effort and patience. 

    And if nothing else, writing every day can build a pretty solid collection of blog posts, even after just one month. Check. Mate.

  • Incomplete Able

    No creative setup is ever really complete, is it? But it is possible to say that milestones have been reached in aiming for an unreachable completeness, no?

    Case-in-point: I received a new piece of music equipment in the mail on Wednesday and it (so-called) completed my composition setup.

    The piece in question is a mid-range multi-track looper pedal, and it fits into my plan of making ambient background music tracks for my audio production project. It joins a list of other equipment including a recorder, mics, a preamp, an effects pedal, a synth, and about a hundred feet of various cables to connect it all together.

    And so for now my setup… it is complete.

    I can do what I want to do. Make what I want to make. Create.

    Which really means…

    It is probably not complete, of course, and in a month or a year or at some other point in the future I’ll decide that there is a gap in what I am able to accomplish with this current-state setup that will suddenly and irreversibly become less complete than what it is today.

    But for a moment, completion for the incompletable seems just so. I relish it, but know that incompletion will drive me to something else equally interesting, too.

  • Reading Lesson

    I spent multiple hours this past weekend reading aloud.

    Call it practice.

    Call it production.

    Whatever it is, it was me attempting to create something from a skill that has never really been in my wheelhouse: reading aloud.

    Like any new-ish or re-visited skill that needs polishing, I have found that the best thing to do is just to do it… and be open to self-reflecting on the effort.

    Asking yourself: How can I make this better?

    Fighting the urge to doubt that progress is being made or to quit outright.

    I felt both, but I persevered and gave myself an impromptu reading lesson, all while building the pieces of a project that I’m excited to move incrementally forward.

  • Keyboard Reps

    Creativity is kind of a muscle. 

    I drove the kid to the community recreation centre this evening and, if only because I pulled a muscle in my back and need to rest it, I brought my computer instead of my own gym gear.

    Usually I come to this building to literally work out my body. I run on the track or do some cycling training on the bike, or do a few sets on the weight machines. I’m not claiming to be a gym nut of any kind, but I do a lot of thinking (and even writing) about the work it takes to keep your body—lungs, heart, muscles, and all of it—in shape.

    Tonight, I’m sitting here with my computer doing some writing.

    I just dropped another five hundred words into my work-in-progress novel.

    Now I’m writing this little ditty. 

    I’m working out my creativity tonight, doing reps on the keyboard, which is arguably an important part of keeping that kind-of but-not-really a muscle in shape.

    I won’t claim to be breaking much of a sweat, but it’s hard work and dedication just the same.

  • 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.