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.