8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [2026] The First Year

  • Critical Commodity

    Minding the gate are too many unworthy of the task.

    If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.

    Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.

    Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes. 

    Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.

    Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.

  • Ten of Diamonds

    Jokingly I would tell people who liked my photographs that I was not so excellent at taking pictures as they suspected: after all, I only ever showed them the good pictures.

    But then it wasn’t exactly a joke, either. 

    See, I think there is a difference between expertise and amateurism, and explaining it is tangled up in my own creative efforts. I am an amateur artist, an amateur photographer, an amateur musician. And I am confident in claiming so because the difference between amateur and expert work isn’t always the output, but rather the effort required to be consistently good at the form. 

    I can make good stuff. But I am admittedly inconsistent.

    In photography I called it my one-in-ten rule: if I took ten pictures, one of them was generally pretty good. Again, I could make good stuff, just inconsistently.

    Inconsistency has a way of nipping you in the backside when you take on a gig to photograph an event, or are asked to sketch with an audience, or need to stand on a stage and play an instrument. Noodling in your basement and occasionally having a terrific night is fundamentally different from  performing on demand. One is the realm of amateurs with wisps of talent, the other is the domain of experts.

    And really. I don’t mind being the diamond in the rough, but admitting there is often much more rough than diamond is also about admitting that you can do these crafts for merely the enjoyment of them, too, and that’s not a joke at all.

  • Eight Clicks

    No one has yet asked, but it’s about time I explained: what’s in a name? What’s in my name, to be exact. 

    I started writing creative fiction under the banner of “8 Clicks from Nowhere” a few years ago. Where it emerged from is not a piece of inspiration that derives meaning or clarity from much anything tangible nor from a deliberate plan. It just is.

    An 8 looks a bit like a B, the first letter of my first name.

    Clicks are webby.

    And if I claimed to be anywhere but the middle of a creative nowhere, I’d be exaggerating.

    Nowhere, you ask?

    I have friends who might eagerly disagree with that sentiment if they thought I was exclusively referring to this physical place. Our city, as much as it would hardly qualify for a shortlist of creative hotspots of the world, is neither a slouch for creative souls. 

    But yet I have often felt a pang of regret that while I live geographically in a place that is just okay for creative collaboration, I definitely live mentally, emotionally, spiritually in a place that is an oasis in a deadly dessert of creative isolation.

    I have long struggled to find a kindred spirit of the kind who might dig deep into the fertile soils of imagination where I tend.

    It is a lonely creative space.

    It has been nothing short of a lifelong state for which I have no clear remedy.

    It is, then, a state of creative existence I have embraced in my techie, webby name, finding myself as I do 8 clicks from nowhere in particular.

  • Comic Sounds

    I am no musician. 

    I’m not trying to be humble, but merely to tell you that despite being moderately okay at three instruments, being able to read music, and having a respectable recording studio hacked together in my basement office, I am really just dabbling in what most people would consider proper musical creativity.

    And I’m okay with that.

    I am trying to learn, strapped for access to resources and time and patience, at least the kind granted to a guy in his late forties who most people feel should either already be good at this kind of thing or should stop “acting like a kid” and do something more serious than compose jittery jams in his pyjamas. 

    I used to recap an essay I once read about the font Comic Sans. You know it. It’s the most hated font in the design world, the free comic-book-ish font that came with Microsoft Windows long ago and shows up on “fun” corporate posters designed by people who don’t design for a living. I defended that font: people who use Comic Sans, I said remembering that essay, are thinking about design. They are arguably, well, just not great at it… yet.

    They are no designers. 

    But they are trying…the same way I am trying with music, art, and a dozen other creative pursuits. And rather than make fun of anything designed with Comic Sans, perhaps we should be thinking of it instead as a teaching opportunity. We should be thinking of it as made by someone who’s mind is open to the possibilities of creative expression.

  • Just Because

    This daily public affirmation has a blog.

    Oh, so you’ve figured it out? A little more than forty-odd posts into my persistent writing of these little public missives about my creative explorations  right here every weekday and perhaps you are sitting there pondering the point of two hundred words of indulgent affirmation.

    I could justify it. I could try and convince you that there was some marketable value inherent in such a prospect, despite that most pursuers of profit have moved onto bigger platforms. I could point at the personal brand value of exploratory concepts in words and sounds and images. I could brag about some hidden big-picture strategy towards a long term personal creative goal.

    I could. I won’t. It would all be a lie.

    Why do musicians play scales?

    Why do runners log training runs?

    Why do chefs trial recipes?

    Why do dogs howl at the moonlight?

    The answer is practice. The answer is habit. The answer is instinct and drive and compulsion to create and make and share and then makes some more.  The answer is doing without expectation of audience or purpose or influence or flex. The answer is accountability to self and ideas. The answer is human and even more than that, the answer is universally personal.