8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • People Places

    I am writing this from within the abyss of the political dark ages of the mid twenty-twenties. 

    Nationalism is in a kind of haphazard resurgence. The media is faltering. Artificial intelligence is clouding the internet with a seemingly unlimited supply of slop and misinformation.

    It is dire.

    And artists have this important role to play: continuing to make stuff despite the inanity. 

    Despite wars. Despite clashing cultures. Despite self-dealing politicians. Despite generative algorithms pumping out dead-on-arrival content.

    And to top it all of, half of the people that could read this will discount it as the words of a man sitting across on the other side of a funhouse mirror making up a reality they disagree with. We can’t even see eye to eye on that anymore.

    Culture is opinion. Opinion is truth. And truth (whatever that might be) has always shaped the stories we tell through our words, sounds, music, and art.

    I write this very blog in competition with countless algorithms that will fight to ensure it only get seen if it generates money for a shareholder somewhere, profit for a corporate bottom line, or revenue for someone who is probably not me.

    We are humans caught up in a system and we are treading water in a creative torrent that we can barely understand. The abyss is below. The sky is above—so long as we can keep our heads above the flow of society.

    Under the category of People & Places, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Pinch Poster

    This is not the post I had intended to drop here today.

    I’ve been keeping about a week and a half ahead of my schedule these days, writing posts, getting them queued up on the back end of the blog, giving myself both breathing room and time to go back over and revise stuff I’ve written before it goes live.

    And about two weeks ago I started a whole new series. It was going to be about a bunch of big projects I was going to tackle, and write big multi-part articles about.

    I wrote an introduction post that was supposed to go out instead of this post.

    It fumbled and flopped before it even launched. I was struggling getting the actual project done in the middle of writing all about how great it was going. [Slowly pulls back curtain and…]

    In this case, I realized that committing to the time to do the project itself was just out of the realm of reasonability as summer arrives and things get busier around our house. 

    I accept failure as a natural part of working on big ideas. Not everything is going to take and sometimes—like this past week—you’re going to find that you’ve bit off a bit more than you can chew on. Take the L and move on.

  • Summer Break

    As much as I sometimes complain about the Monday evening drive—often through cold and snow— to our orchestra rehearsals all season, I do miss it when it pauses for the summer.

    About a ten days prior to writing this we had our end-of-the-season concert, our final show, and  (after a potluck dinner a few days later) wrapped the season.

    In the cadence of my creative musical soul I should have gone to rehearsal last night.

    There was no rehearsal.

    Again, we’re on summer break.

    When I was a kid creativity was an obligation. I would have rather parked in front of the television, or played video games or—honestly—just gone out and hung around with my friends. Being sent off to extra-curricular activities, even as few and scattered as those opportunities were for me, were disruptions to my life.

    A few decades pass by and here I am pondering how to fill the vacant summer months when the air is quieter and my creative contemporaries are off doing other things.

    I’ll get over it. I’ll find something to write or draw. I’ll find music to play on my own. I’ll prevail.

    But it does all make me realize how much I’ve internalized the creative twists and turns of my soul into the person who I think I want to be in this part of my life. Missing—craving—that creative community when it pauses is like a symptom for which the cure is just to keep making more stuff.

  • Free Pics

    I give away a lot of my art and photography.

    I don’t often or consciously think of it like that, but in the moments when I am challenged on the value of what I make I also tend to get snagged on this little reality: I give a lot of it away for free and don’t think twice about it, either.

    There is a value proposition mixed in there, of course.

    Value comes from demand and demand is not automatic: that is to say, my photos, say, only have value if someone wants them and just because I take them doesn’t mean they automatically have a corresponding someone who wants them. 

    Value, in this way is a bit circular. You need to create the value by creating an audience, and you create an audience by lowering the value, often to zero, of your work so that the audience can have it, learn to love it, and eventually want to pay for it.

    At least, that’s one way.

    I’ve never consciously done that… but I have done it unconsciously. I have taken photos on my own time and motivation and become the guy that someone has said, yes please, here’s money, give us more. It really has worked that way. 

    But maybe you have to give a lot away first.

    And maybe too, you have to be okay with something you made having a value that is something other than  a cash transaction.

  • Confidence Boosts

    I bought yet another book of sheet music recently.

    That’s what musicians probably do, right? I assume so myself. Going to the music store makes me feel like how I used to feel going to the bookstore or the record store (way back when that was a thing) and I spent hours browsing through the stacked pages of a million potential adventures through grand ideas or creative expression.  Sheet music still seems to hold that grip on me.

    I bought a book of sheet music that is probably too hard for me to play.

    Precisely, it was a thick book of classical standards, two and a half centimetres of paper bound up with literally hundreds of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and a couple dozen more mostly-famous composers. Intermediate piano music.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I can read music. I’ve been playing some form of instrument for about forty-five years, most recently going on a music journey with the violin.  But having delved in a serious attempt to learn how to play the piano this past year I would still neatly categorize myself as a beginner. 

    And now I have this sheath of music for intermediate players. It’s probably, almost certainly, too hard for me to play… right now.

    Confidence is many things, often immeasurable things, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I must have a least a little bit of it: I invested in my future self this week and I bought a book of music that is aspirational, too difficult for me today, but some part of me must believe that tomorrow will be better, huh?