8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Social Disfunction

    You know my type. 

    When I go to a social function, I’m the weird guy with the camera.

    Oh, I represent. I dance at weddings. I play games at parties. I help with the dishes at the holiday dinners. I’m not just the guy with the camera, but—yeah. I’m usually the one taking photos.

    I call it a type because like every artistic pursuit there is always a cliché. There is always a tell. There is always a secret handshake that isn’t a handshake but maybe just a really nice camera that never leaves the hand and—shake: you recognize the other weird guys from a mile away.

    Weird camera guys find other weird camera guys at social functions. We talk. We compare equipment, stories, and frustrations. 

    Because… that’s community.

    That’s the thing you want but you never recognize it until you’re driving home later that evening thinking you should have connected with that other weird camera guy on instagram or something so you could maybe turn an awkward social function conversation into something creatively productive—a collaboration, or maybe just someone to talk to about that thing you love to do.

    I know my type. I’m the weird camera guy, and these hobbies are often lonely enough without pretending that we don’t see each other.

  • Everything Ever

    The problem with unlimited access to entertainment and media is simple: in a sea of everything ever made powered by computational algorithms designed to sort it all out we mostly only see the very best of the very best.

    Some of you may disagree that what you are seeing in your feeds is “the best” but my point is not that it qualitatively perfect, rather that it has been sorted by a bunch of factors that elevate it up to the top of the incredibly huge heap of everything ever made. It served the algorithm well, so it “surfaced” more frequently.

    This isn’t a problem if you are only a consumer of these things, of course. In fact, great, you are seeing the stuff that everyone else likes. You are the beneficiary of the system working in your favour.

    This is a huge problem if you make stuff.

    Why?

    It is a huge problem because frequently seeing only the very best of the very best, the cream of the crop, the top ‘o the heap, or the GOAT of all things is a terribly easy way to demotivate oneself.

    There is a tension in the heart of every artist: comparison. 

    Am I good enough? How does what I make rank against the collection of what other people have done before me? Is this story interesting? Is my photo popping? Does that song I wrote make people want to add it to a playlist?

    Inundated by everything that ever was, filtered for interest, pop, and playability, honed by the algorithm, how could anyone just starting out on a creative journey hope to compare? 

    We can’t. At least not at first. At least not without countless hours devoted to refining the effort. And maybe the answer is to close out the comparison, acknowledge that the world is filled with shiny beautiful things, and keep making stuff.

  • Store Front

    Unless you’ve dived deep into these writings you may be blissfully unaware that I am doing (and posting) a lot of words.  I’ve written about writing at various points through this project, from explaining about this website, to name dropping my other parallel projects, to lamenting my struggles with trying to get my fiction into a state of something bigger than some scribbled drafts. Whatever you’ve read, it’s probably not half of the story, but all you need to know is that I’ve been putting words on paper (digital paper, ahem) without break since leaving my government job, and that has been going on three and half years now.

    Phew!

    And with all that sitting in drives and database archives and files and all over the place, I had an idea and the inclination to do something with it.

    I built a digital publication studio… which is not really all that much to do in the modern internet: a couple plugins, more words, some imagery, a payment gateway and a storefront.

    As you are reading this, my shop has been online for a couple days.

    Now look, I’ve committed multiple times in things I’ve written to not advertising on these sites. But when I write that what I mean to tell you is that I’m not going to pepper this site with third party click ads or do sponsored posts or dive into corporate collaborations.

    On the other hand, every creative maker needs a way to sell their own wares.

    My wares are words.  My products have for a long time been (free) websites that are not cluttered with paywalls or ad breaks or spammy experiences.

    To supplement that I decided (like any responsible creative) I should turn those free sites (still now and forever free) into something with a bit of added value. My storefront will start to have a collection of anthologies in PDF or DRM-free ePub formats so that you can download larger collections of posts to read offline, in a more coherent order, and will be yours to own forever.

    So I lied. One advertisement is coming to this site: the occasional nudging reminder that you can support me and my sites by buying a digital download of my work. It’s the dirty side of creativity, but—and I’ve written this over and over, you can download an anthology and check—what’s the point of making stuff if no one ever sees it?

  • Duty Demand

    I suppose many people read this site and assume that I’m some sort of creative workhorse, never stopping, never resting, burning the candle at both ends (as they say) and churning out endless works of creative brilliance powered by vast, sweeping moments of inspiration granted from on high.

    Heck, nothing could be further from the truth.

    I squeeze in a nap almost every day. I play video games whilst prone on the couch. I take the dog for long meandering walks in the park. I doom scroll. I sit idle while I try to work up the motivation to do something besides sitting idle. I’m just a guy.

    I struggle with ideas. I run plots over and over and over in my head and then decide half way through that the story is going nowhere. I carry around empty notebooks. I put ideas in point form into my phone and then forget what I was trying to say on the topic. I tear up terrible paintings and use the back sides as scrap paper. I noodle on my musical instruments and ignore the pieces I should be practicing while I endlessly tune or wipe dust from the corners. 

    Creativity is a lot of things, but I don’t think I would personally call it a straight line.

    Creativity is a mindset. Creativity is a duty to a long game. Creativity is holding the spirit of making and sharing and inventing and dreaming in your head—and then being ready to push on with the work when opportunity strikes, sure… but it is also habit.

    I am all those things from before but also I block off time every day to write. I keep notes on my phone. I hang those musical instruments near a music stand so I can reach over and pluck them from the wall to play. I have rituals. I have schedules. I have deadlines. I have demands I put upon myself to get the work done through the chaos of life. 

    That’s long game consistency, and creativity often comes simply from getting the work done around other commitments and obligations. Under the category of Duty & Demand I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Self Employed

    Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.

    Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.

    Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.

    I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.

    It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.

    Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.

    For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot. 

    I would say I was working.

    The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.

    The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.

    As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way. 

    Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?