8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Never Enough 

    I recently came across a social media thread that got my head churning. 

    A person whom I follow, a prolific nature photographer, had received a comment from another of his followers demanding—demanding!—that he reveal the location of the photograph. He posted screenshots of their conversation and it went pretty much exactly how one might expect a dialog between a proud creator and an entitled audience member might escalate into digital fisticuffs. 

    Such is the nature of making anything for a large audience these days, and the the online market in which we all abide merely seems to amplify it as it sends our work to the furthest reaches of culture and opinion. This, and a long list of similar reactions I’ve had personally with people online lately, illustrates a point that has been gnawing at me: you can never know what your audience expects from your art.

    In this case, the photograph was beautiful and interesting and since it was shared for free with tens of thousands of people one would have thought there should be little to complain about. In fact, one would have thought the creator had been more than generous giving away their work. But the person who complained was aggrieved and argued that the photographer was required to go one step further and provide geographic coordinates for the location of the photo.

    Why?

    Unclear.

    But I’ve seen this effect emerge with increasing frequency.

    What you believe to be generosity and quality, giving one hundred percent for very little in return is viewed as insufficient by an invisible audience.

    And you can choose to agree and shrivel at the criticism, adapt to the feedback—or just keep doing what you are doing.

  • Daily Enough

    As I publish these words on my blog I am marking twenty-five years of dedicated posting online. It has made me neither rich nor famous, but I have done it nonetheless.

    There are a lot of famous blogs out there, but the one that always sticks in my head is Seth’s Blog[1], the uplifting and advice-for-life daily posts of Seth Godin, author and marketing guru to the masses. 

    I couldn’t tell you for sure if Seth himself sits down and writes his own blog posts anymore (though I suspect he’s done well enough for himself lately that he has a team of people who manage the logistics of that sort of thing these days and perhaps his thoughts are merely distilled from conversations or other insights—but then I may be completely wrong about that, too) but every day, no matter what, a new post appears on his blog and offers up even just a few sentences of insight. All for free.

    8 Clicks from Nowhere is unabashedly written in the spirit of Seth’s Blog, not as a copycat but as a spiritual and philosophical guiding light: daily insights for whatever they are worth offered up on a free-to-access website.

    As of this post I’ve been posting routinely for a quarter of a century in this format.

    And again—not rich and not famous for it, but certainly a better writer, a deeper thinker, and often driven to push myself for the sake of having something to write about. That’s just about enough to keep me going.

  • Hard Change

    Change is hard.

    Until I went through the work of trying to rebuild my career from scratch I spent a tremendous amount of time looking across the bridge of that change and imagining what was on the other side. 

    Before I spin this little essay into a retelling of a whole “grass is greener on the other side” idiomatic fallacy of yearning, I will clarify: I think that yearning for change can be motivated by all sorts of things, and yes, visualizing the future state of your life in a positive way is one of those things. I also think there are a lot of reasons that people seek change in their lives and none of them are entirely right-thinking nor entirely wrongheaded, either. 

    Change is motivated by many things and each of those things is shaped by personal circumstance, individual and unique as fingerprints, combining the notions of our histories, our dreams, our hopes and our fears. And more so, I think that if you were to ask anyone to fully explain their motivation for change they might look at you with a distant stare and struggle to fully explain the deepest of those impulses to cross the bridge into something new.

    I have been walking across my own bridge for over two years now and I still cannot quite see the other side except in whispered rumours and hints of something interesting when the fog occasionally shifts and my vision clears long enough to look. It’s a hard walk. And an even harder one to justify to those still standing on solid ground.

  • Middle Earth

    I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion[1] by Tolkien and was reminded of how the book opens: it is a collection of stories, after all, and one of the first pieces is a long letter written by Tolkien to one of his colleagues. In it he writes describing in informal detail a great deal of in depth background and lore of the world of novels. 

    Of course, this is interesting just on its own, particularly if you are fan of the fantasy stories set in Middle Earth. 

    But from a creative point of view it is interesting for a whole other reason: the format.

    We all struggle with busy lives. The world doesn’t routinely pause for any of us to sit down and just write. Even if you had weeks of time off from a paid job to explore creatively, fitting in words and creative effort needs to be squeezed in around managing your household or cooking meals or shovelling snow. 

    As someone put it aptly on social media recently, even just sending a text message these days is a whole spell slot. 

    Tolkien may not have had a busy life in the way we think of it, certainly not in the sense of replying to emails and curating a personal brand on social media, but he was a professor and a scholar and pre-digital. 

    And I certainly can’t assume or know if he wrote such a letter that sits in the introduction of one of his lesser-famous books for any other purpose than correspondence. Yet, he certainly found an interesting way to multi-task that we still enjoy the results of decades later.

  • Strange Runs

    I took up distance running seriously in 2008, shortly after my daughter was born. I had been dabbling in the sport for a decade previous, but right around new years and that time of making resolutions I signed up to join a training clinic at the local running supply store. Nearly two decades later I’ve run tens of thousands of kilometres, completed hundreds of races, and found a network of people who are some of my closest friends.

    Being a runner also had a strange effect at the office. 

    There were enough of us runners that we found each other. In meetings, in the lunch room, or by winks and nudges from others who relayed that “did you know so and so is a runner, too?”

    This is not a post about running. 

    This is a post about networking.

    Taking up a sport, a hobby or a creative passion and being open about that in your professional life has a weird and magical way of interconnecting us in the otherwise dispassionate spaces of the work world. 

    …not that this is some deep insight. Shared interests forge tribes, after all. 

     But while you could just as easily find that tribe talking about a great band or the local sports club, finding out that your coworkers are aspiring authors, avid photographers, spending their evenings composing music, or just own a really expensive running watch, too, is a different level of camaraderie that shouldn’t be overlooked by creative spirits.