8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: just making stuff

  • Incompletable

    No creative setup is ever really complete, is it? But it is possible to say that milestones have been reached in aiming for an unreachable completeness, no?

    Case-in-point: I received a new piece of music equipment in the mail on Wednesday and it (so-called) completed my composition setup.

    The piece in question is a mid-range multi-track looper pedal, and it fits into my plan of making ambient background music tracks for my audio production project. It joins a list of other equipment including a recorder, mics, a preamp, an effects pedal, a synth, and about a hundred feet of various cables to connect it all together.

    And so for now my setup… it is complete.

    I can do what I want to do. Make what I want to make. Create.

    Which really means…

    It is probably not complete, of course, and in a month or a year or at some other point in the future I’ll decide that there is a gap in what I am able to accomplish with this current-state setup that will suddenly and irreversibly become less complete than what it is today.

    But for a moment, completion for the incompletable seems just so. I relish it, but know that incompletion will drive me to something else equally interesting, too.

  • Reading Lesson

    I spent multiple hours this past weekend reading aloud.

    Call it practice.

    Call it production.

    Whatever it is, it was me attempting to create something from a skill that has never really been in my wheelhouse: reading aloud.

    Like any new-ish or re-visited skill that needs polishing, I have found that the best thing to do is just to do it… and be open to self-reflecting on the effort.

    Asking yourself: How can I make this better?

    Fighting the urge to doubt that progress is being made or to quit outright.

    I felt both, but I persevered and gave myself an impromptu reading lesson, all while building the pieces of a project that I’m excited to move incrementally forward.

  • Slow Down Cowboy

    I spent nearly three hours this morning working on recording audio for my project and the end result of all that work is what probably amounts to only about three minutes of usable audio.

    Let me back up.

    I am working on a new novel, and a side-project part of that effort has me attempting to translate it from the written word stuck inside a word processor on my computer into an audiobook-style production with some bespoke tunes and sound effects.

    I have a solid microphone setup with a pre-amp, hardware digital recorder, digital synths, effects pedals and wires going in twelve different directions.

    But it turns out after all the work I did to write a story and set up a technology jungle to set my voice into sound waves in file on my hard drive, what I needed most was practice reading at a practiced pace suitable for storytelling.

    Who would have thought, huh?

    When I figured out how to read slowly, enunciating each word, the results were oh so much better.

  • Dabbling

    The risk when taking on any new project is that it might all too quickly become another notch on one’s chalkboard of failed projects. The risk of dabbling is that often, ultimately, boredom sets in and you find yourself moving on to something else new.

    If being a dabbler bothers you, how does one stop dabbling and start honing and refining—especially if one is inclined to be more of a dabbler than a deep diver?

    I admit, I am a bit of a shiny object guy when it comes to my hobbies. I see something new and interesting and yeah, admittedly I often do dive deeply into it for a while—that is, usually, until I’ve learned enough about said shiny object that learning about it becomes less interesting than it was at the beginning. And then often, said shiny object goes on the shelf, forgotten.

    Dabbling done… next.

    To fight through and beyond the honeymoon period for any new project my personal tactic has generally been to use goals or public accountability or external commitments. It’s neither complex nor especially obscure. Signing up for a language class for group accountability… or telling everyone you meet your running goal race… or planning a trip to sketch in another country. All are examples of great counter-dabbling tools.

    These sorts of external motivators create a kind of reward system to overcome the raw dopamine drop when the innate rewards of dabbling fade. 

    Or… just don’t do any of that. Dabbling in countless interesting hobbies to sample what life has to offer, well, that’s fine, too.

  • Impossible Summit

    It’s easy to aim too high when we start a new project. It’s easy to think that anything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement. It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.

    I am just starting out on this project and I have not only accepted that every new post is not going to be a gem of enlightenment and a spark of insight. 

    I have decades of writing experience, but even so, the idea of generating something interesting to say five times a week is daunting and seems as though an endless mountain is rising in front of me.

    Yet.

    The climb is the point. 

    I may never reach that impossible summit.

    And anyone who creates needs to be okay with that idea.

    Nothing here is meant to be a final, salable product held up for judgement because most of it is just for myself, yes, shared with the world but nothing more than that.

    January 13 – Audio Version