8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: meta monday

If you found this tag you may have noticed that I wrote a blog post for each of the main chapters of the site. For a span of time every Monday post was about one of those top level topics, posted in order.

Chapter List

  • Space Silence

    I recently rewatched Alien[1] with the Kid who was doing a critical film analysis for school.  The tagline of the flick is “in space no one can hear you scream” and my first thought was, geeze, that kind of silence would sure help me get some solid writing in.

    Unlike the Kid, who immediately plugged in her headphones and put some video on in the background to “help her focus” as she wrote her essay about xenomorphs and horror science fiction, I usually find I’m the kind of guy who needs as few distractions as possible to get shit done.

    Neither of us are wrong.

    Silence has many meanings, and maybe for you silence is as much about using blaring heavy metal thrasher tunes to silence the inner critic that keeps you from writing. Maybe solitude for you is the negative space of anonymity left behind by a corner table in a crowded cafe. Maybe the conditions that help you find your voice are nothing like mine, or anyone else’s and it would make anyone you explained it to cringe at the very thought.

    The space to create is personal, deep, and often ineffable.

    In the right space no one can hear you scream—or write or yearn for clarity or connect the dots on some great abiding inspiration. Either way, under the category of Space & Silence I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Iteration Epics

    I love the idea of incrementalism. In fact, I have a confession. The original intent of this website, the whole first draft of the plan, was to write one hundred percent about the practice of incremental work, iteration, and working through challenges, gamification, and step-by-step efforts to a bigger goal.

    Instead, I simply made it a single chapter, and—you may have noticed—I talk about it with a bit of bias and abundance.

    Oddly enough as this explanation post (I’ve been writing one, in order, for each of my topics on every Monday for the last twenty-some weeks) came up in the queue, this project is simultaneously approaching it’s two hundredth post. In fact, this may very well be it.  And now well into my tenth month of writing an article for every weekday of this year so far, I’m approaching eighty thousand words of content on this site.

    Eighty thousand words is a book. Printed, you’d pick it up, hold it in your hand and think “Jeeze, this guy’s got something to get off his chest. This is a thick book.”

    I’ve made that. I’ve written it. I’ve posted it. I’ve refined it, tweaked it, supplemented it with citations and definitions. I’ve sent it out into the world for the better part of a year for anyone to read. And I’ve done it all a few hundred words at a time, each and every weekday, iteratively and in increments.

    If that doesn’t hammer home the point I’m trying to make I don’t know what else does. Either way, under the category of Iteration & Epics I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Duty Demand

    I suppose many people read this site and assume that I’m some sort of creative workhorse, never stopping, never resting, burning the candle at both ends (as they say) and churning out endless works of creative brilliance powered by vast, sweeping moments of inspiration granted from on high.

    Heck, nothing could be further from the truth.

    I squeeze in a nap almost every day. I play video games whilst prone on the couch. I take the dog for long meandering walks in the park. I doom scroll. I sit idle while I try to work up the motivation to do something besides sitting idle. I’m just a guy.

    I struggle with ideas. I run plots over and over and over in my head and then decide half way through that the story is going nowhere. I carry around empty notebooks. I put ideas in point form into my phone and then forget what I was trying to say on the topic. I tear up terrible paintings and use the back sides as scrap paper. I noodle on my musical instruments and ignore the pieces I should be practicing while I endlessly tune or wipe dust from the corners. 

    Creativity is a lot of things, but I don’t think I would personally call it a straight line.

    Creativity is a mindset. Creativity is a duty to a long game. Creativity is holding the spirit of making and sharing and inventing and dreaming in your head—and then being ready to push on with the work when opportunity strikes, sure… but it is also habit.

    I am all those things from before but also I block off time every day to write. I keep notes on my phone. I hang those musical instruments near a music stand so I can reach over and pluck them from the wall to play. I have rituals. I have schedules. I have deadlines. I have demands I put upon myself to get the work done through the chaos of life. 

    That’s long game consistency, and creativity often comes simply from getting the work done around other commitments and obligations. Under the category of Duty & Demand I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Death Taxes

    I don’t particularly dwell on it but, just like the rest of you, I’m getting older.

    A few weeks after this post goes live and before the year is out I’ll be turning fifty.

    Five-oh.

    Naturally, as I was putting together the list of topics to write about in this writing project, the notion of my inevitable post-existence emerged as a real strong contender… because we might not dwell on it, but we do occasionally remember that someday all that will be left of any of us is memory and artifacts of our time here. If even that much.

    Creative folks don’t necessarily make shit because they are trying to leave a legacy, but a legacy of our efforts is certainly a side product of living and breathing and dreaming big ideas that translate into written words or composed music or clever little bits of art hanging in someone’s living room.

    Heck, as I walked into my home office I passed a framed cross-stitch sampler we have hanging on the wall that was made by a long-passed ancestor of my spouse. I doubt she sat down to make that, spent hours sewing every single stitch, and pondered whether it would be the one thing that her great-granddaughter someday had left to remember she had ever existed. It’s a morbid thought, but these little things, moments captured in creativity and craftsmanship might turn into exactly that much for most of us—if we’re even that lucky.

    Will some painting I’ve already painted be all that is left of everything I ever aspired to sketch?

    Are there collections of words and photos yet to be pounded into keys or snapped through lenses that will ultimately and solely remain to mark my interest in those hobbies?

    What will the legacy of any of our creative lives become after we die?

    Like I said, I don’t particularly dwell on it but under the category of Death & Taxes I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Pomp Popularity

    I always have an eye open for interesting unpolished creative stones when I’m wading through the streams of my social feeds.

    There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.

    It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.

    It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.

    I have explored this theme routinely on this project. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.

    In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.

    We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens. 

    Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.