8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: blogging

Chapter List

  • Canada Day-ish

    Being Canadian means our annual celebration of national pride falls on the exact-ish half way point of the year. Where New Years Day is the first day of the year, Canada Day, July 1st, is on the first day of the second half of the year.

    This year also happens to be the day when I mark the exact six month anniversary of this writing project. It’s been half a year of daily-ish blog posts.

    What that means for the site is that after six months of working on this project, I have accumulated one hundred and twenty-seven (plus this one) posts on some meandering thoughts on creativity and pursuing a creative-ish life.

    Routine can lead to profoundly interesting things. Iteration of effort, keeping at something through incremental addition and improvements can break through the overwhelming perception of size and complexity and spark a kind of driving force that can make anyone successful-ish.

    Readers may have already noted that I am an evangelist-ish for the the incrementalism of things.  Doing a little bit each day can simply get the work done.

    And on a day like this, when I’ve crossed yet another milestone and keep going, posting the next post and the next and knowing that there are likely a few more in the queue even as you are reading these words, is the best I can do to show by example of what twenty minutes of writing per day can accomplish-ish.

  • Post Haste

    I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain for a moment and remind you that sometimes creativity is smoke and mirrors, too.

    Truth is, I write these words weeks in advance of you reading them.

    Writing a daily blog is not always just about the dedicated day-after-day work of coming up with new ideas and then sitting down at a keyboard. Rather, sometimes it’s about working smarter and planning ahead. Sometimes it’s about organization and staging and schedules. Sometimes it’s a business plan.

    You want a life skill? You want to be better at a desk job? You want to get into a corporate strategic mindset? You want to learn how to get stuff done on a schedule? Oh, you can read about it in a textbook or download a course on business planning. 

    But might I suggest that you try instead a big creative project.

    Make a weekly web comic that demands you create on a schedule and manage a website.

    Join a band and try to release a demo that involves scheduling, promotion and technical skills.

    Write a novel that insists on long term strategic planning and holding big scope ideas in your head.

    I write these posts sometimes weeks in advance and try to keep between five and ten in my publication queue. Not only does that save me from rushing to write something on topic on every busy morning, but it gives me time to edit and hone and shuffle and plan out how I am making this site.

    It’s strategy. It’s planning. It’s bigger.

    And it’s more than creativity: it’s resume fodder, too.

  • 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.

  • Deeper Seeking

    What is the meaning of it all?

    Oh sure, some people would be happy to tell you that they have all the answers. Some people will even sell you those answers—for the right price, of course.

    I’m not buying, but it doesn’t mean I am in a position to sell, either.

    As I sweep through my life and close in on my fiftieth birthday later this year, I knew better than to expect I would have figured everything out by this point—but I didn’t figure I would still be this far away from any satisfying answers.

    And the world really does seem in shambles right now, doesn’t it?

    How to fix that? Well. For a few months now I’ve been writing this week-daily blog it has done interesting things to the way I have been thinking about inspiration and personal creativity and motivation to make interesting stuff. It’s valuable to me—in other words. But lately it’s been pretty niche without much room for deeper thoughts on the meaning of life and the other sorts of things I’ve been yearning to write about more, too. Something inside of me said, hmmm, what if it also helped work through something a little more—um—metaphysical?

    Thus, here we are. My haunt. This blog. And I’m expanding a bit.

    I started writing on my list of ideas, and realized I had a lot of ground to cover in any such exploration. To that end, I don’t know exactly where I’m going, but I think I can probably cobble together a compass to help me figure out which way to start walking. 

    My plan is to not only keep writing on creativity and inspiration, but to write more posts on mindfulness, balance, clarity and hope, much of it in the context of work, culture, aging, and trying to find a fit for oneself in society, too. It all seems but a distant dot on an unfamiliar map, but I’m determined to get a little closer with each entry here.

  • 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?