8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Desire Paths

    There is a principle in urban design called “desire paths” wherein smart planners pave the shortcuts.

    You’d recognize this if you ever saw it. The example that comes to mind for me is the Quad in my alma mater. A big grassy field between classroom buildings existed as a place where students hung out, studied, napped, snacked, and of course, travelled between lectures. The sidewalk infrastructure was in place, but it didn’t represent the paths that students actually walked. The shortcuts wore into the grass as bare-earth trails trampled by a million footsteps. So, when the space was renovated, those exact paths were paved with proper sidewalks, voted on by countless students just existing.

    Noticing where shortcuts emerge and making those paths formal and proper, then, is something of a smart move. It is an act of recognition that the subconscious of many (or even just one) can tell us something we didn’t overtly consider.

    Recognizing your own shortcuts to creative expression is a similar act of finding the desire paths leading you towards creative fulfillment. Understanding that no matter what you do, your subconscious may be looking for the shortcuts between idea and product, between notion and outcome. 

    Forcing formality on your creative process or trying to follow a path that you “designed” based on your conscious consideration, may neither be the best way to get there, or the shortest, cleanest route.

    Instead, noticing the habits, being aware of the hacks, and catching those tricks you’ve stumbled on to get words on the page, ink on paper, or notes into the universe are the shortcuts that you should mix up some mental concrete and pave them straight through to your destination.

  • Cheerleader Types

    Not everyone is a creative production engine, and that’s okay.

    Building a community is an effort that requires not just surrounding yourself with other creative people, but finding good people who support you from the sidelines.

    This step is easy to overlook when it’s missing, and even easier to take for granted when it falls into place. 

    Having people in your life who want to read your writing, hang your art, and attend your concerts is never automatic. It’s precious and a reminder that someone is paying attention. It can be all that holds you together on those too-frequent days when it seems like obscurity and irrelevance is your only companion on a creative adventure. It can hold it all together when the path is unclear.

    Cheerleaders are, of course, not devoid of creativity or otherwise lacking in motivation. Heck no. But they might be people who appreciate your efforts in a field that they themselves do not excel. They are almost certainly people who understand the soul of creative effort and know that encouragement and support are the lifeblood and fuel of its continuity. 

    And most often, they come unasked. You can’t beg and plead for them to cheer and you cannot be anything but thankful that they stay for a day, a month or a lifetime. 

    But when you find them, notice them, and cheer right back.

  • Gold Pans

    I was out for a walk near the river recently when I came across a guy sitting on a stool panning for gold. He had a small wagon-load of equipment, but he hailed me closer and talked me through the effort while he showed me the flecks of gold he’d dredged from the sand. They were right there reflecting off the bottom of his plastic pan.

    It was an encounter that was compelling enough that for a day or two I actually considered going to the local outdoor store and buying my own gold panning pan. I haven’t yet, but as I’m often wont to do my brain turned his hobby in an apt metaphor for the creative process in general.

    Creativity is after all sifting through a lot of worthless crud to find flecks of something more valuable.

    We often see the final product, but neglect to notice the heaps of debris remaining from the process itself.

    My gold panning friend told it me took five shovelfuls of riverbed muck and a couple hours worth of effort to reveal that dim constellation of golden specks on the bottom of his pan. Were they not clinging to the pan by hydrostatic forces they would have fluttered away in a stiff breeze. The heap of rocky mud at his feet was orders of magnitude larger.

    How many words does a writer need to write before the best distillation and clearest ideas of value form on her page?

    How much paint does an artist need to brush onto paper before something beautiful emerges from the colours?

    How many notes are lost to practice and rehearsal and noodling towards refined skill before a musician performs or records a hit?

    We’re all panning for gold, in our way, and the yields seem microscopic when viewed from the perspective of effort. But too, they are just as likely to glitter in the eyes of a random passerby who we call over to look at what we’ve made.

  • Write Always

    Don’t stop.

    You want to be better at anything? Keep plugging away and don’t ever stop practicing, and that goes doubly so for writing. Why? It just does—filled as it is with nuance and expectation and alive right there in the heart of everything we do, say, hear, and make.

    Writers write.

    They just do. And you are almost certainly only a writer when you are writing: actively penning words onto the page, typing characters into a keyboard or brewing the thoughts in your brain for your next opportunity to do more writing. 

    Writing can be messy. It can be scattered. It can be long or short, formal or stylistically chaotic. Writing can be words strung together in a notepad app, or traced with a lusciously thick felt-tipped marker on a wall. Writing can be private scribbles in a journal or annoying daily posts in a public website launched into the universe with no clear destination or audience.

    Whatever it ultimately becomes, the writing itself is an action. To write is a verb. 

    Writing is the act of filling the gaps between words. Writing is temporary and temporal. 

    And you need to write always. Why?  If you need to ask then you are not one of us.

    Because writers write.

  • Pomp Popularity

    I always have an eye open for interesting unpolished creative stones when I’m wading through the streams of my social feeds.

    There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.

    It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.

    It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.

    I have explored this theme routinely on this blog. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.

    In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.

    We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens. 

    Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.