8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: blogging for fun

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Ever Greened

    April 2026, this month, marks the twenty-fifth year of my blogging adventures.

    A quarter of a century has been spent by me posting whimsical insights and routine thoughts into the internet for strangers—perhaps just like you—to read and ponder.

    To be fair, I’ve long since archived most of the things I wrote over the years. Much of it was neither evergreen nor the quality of stuff that really needed to be kept public. I have copies of virtually all of it, of course, but much of it is barely the equivalent of reading through back issues of the local newspaper from decades past. Interesting, maybe, but hardly worth the effort of keeping on the shelves.

    It’s still early days here, but I have modelled this particular take at blogging with a little more intentionality towards building a collection of posts that will stand the test of time. 

    What does it look like to write posts that are interesting right now, but might also be interesting in five or ten years?  If somehow I was able to keep this effort up for the next decade or two, would I still go back to the early posts and read through with interest… or with a cringe?

  • Photo Excuses

    If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, every one of the posts on this site is at least one thousand two hundred words long.

    You may not have noticed but I attach a unique monochromatic abstract photo (taken by me) to each and every one of my posts. It is not obvious, and chances are you have completely overlooked said pic (unless you are visiting from social media where it tends to get scooped up as the featured image.)

    Also. They are unconnected from the subject of each post.

    So why do it?

    Apart from simply having an excuse to take more photos, my intention with adding a photo to each post is raw abstraction and artistic curiosity. 

    Too often we find ourselves trapped inside the concept of finding a reason: return on investment, increasing marketability, adding context, or something else linked to clicks and sales and revenue. 

    But none of that matters in this case. I do it simply because I want to… and to make a point: that value can be measured in things beyond money. Value can be beauty. Value can be joy. Value can be a secret shared between people.

    These photos? They take time to take. They eat up server space and internet bandwidth. They are nearly invisible and usually unnoticed. But the sheer art of it means I wouldn’t ever stop.

  • 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.

  • 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.