8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Hard Change Branch · Part Three

    Change is hard.

    I left my government job over three years ago and I still sputter out excuses when I cross paths with someone who questions the narrative. No one can understand why. No one can make sense of decoupling from a career out of free will.

    An interaction usually goes something like this:

    Oh, hey—how are you? What are you up to these days—still with… We worked together or we knew each other professionally and the only thing we had in common was our ties to that job.

    No. I’ve been gone for years now. You?

    No. I’m with… they say some name of some company I’m unlikely to remember later… what are you doing then?

    Here, I should interject and say—Woohoo! I’ve realized a dream. I spend my days writing and making and exploring. I wrote a novel and I’m writing short stories nearly every day and I’m posting prolifically on a couple of websites. I get involved in the community. I spend time with my family. The ladies who sell me tea the cafe know me by name. I’m splendidly happy with my lot—how is corporate life going?

    I don’t.

    Oh, you know—I do some contract work here and there. It’s not a lie. I do. Trying to start my own little business and it’s slow going.

    That sounds amazing. Does it really?

    I make a bit more small talk and it never goes back to anything of substance. No one cares—in the best ways and the worst, no one cares that you leapt from the moving train of your career and are wandering in the wilderness trying to find meaning. And that’s fine. No one needs to care.

    But then that’s the problem: Change is hard, and too often I find myself making excuses for why my change has been so fuzzy rather than just admitting that change is amazing, too.

  • Productivity Obsession Updated · v2

    I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

    I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

    In October I coded a new app to take another swing at the “productivity tool” challenge.

    Past attempts have been simple task tracking apps with checklists and goals.

    This latest attempt has been a behemoth of curiosity and complexity: it posits an imagined futuristic city inhabited by a creative underground market where skills are traded and jobs are posted. The more creative work one logs in the system the more the city grows and the more interesting things are unlocked.

    My proudest achievement is that the imagined city has a radio station that plays lo-fi tunes in the background while I work, encouraging me to have the app open on my computer for easy logging.

    It’s immensely cool and I’m having so much fun exploring the little novelty, but…

    Does any of it actually work to make me more productive?

    I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks, checklists, logs and databases no matter their format, are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have accountability to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that actually matter at the end of the day.

  • Short Stories Branch · Part Two

    I dug in.

    I figured that challenging myself to write one short story per month would be exactly that: a challenge. And two months and two stories in, I’m finding it to be a comfortable one.

    A few years ago when I set out to write a novel in my newfound state of semi-retirement-slash-unemployment, I spent a couple months world building.  I had a grain of an idea but wanting to focus on a proper character-driven novel in a quasi-science fiction setting, I had long decided I couldn’t just sit down and start writing. No pantsing that. 

    World building can be a whole discipline in itself. One can get too easily lost in fleshing out elaborate imaginary places for your beloved characters to find themselves existing.

    I locked in, though. I built an alternate reality at the edge of my own, fabricated a make-believe city mashed together out of the two places in the world where I spend most of my time, gave it a new name and mixed in a paranormal science-fiction vibe. 

    —then I wrote the better part of three novels there.

    It is within the world of that same city where I have been penning my short stories.

    Short story is a curious art form and so much different than writing a novel, and having a world that is pre-built in my own mind—and previously experienced through a fiction writers eyes in three previous novels—has been immensely helpful. Two or three people encounter something strange and unusual in the mundane day-to-day of life there, and it makes for ready fodder to build an interesting tale.

    I’ve penned two stories so far, have my third queued up, and am getting my head around an editing plan for each. I’ve wrapped this challenge in many things: habit and public accountability, sure, but making it part of my larger project, too. 

    Writing shorter works becomes an act that not only further fleshes out my world for future novels but becomes artifacts in their own right. 

  • 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.