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.

But stepping away from public platforms does not need to mean taking a vow of electronic silence. The professional blog-meets-sequential writing project may seem old school and a bit retro, but there’s something classic and suave about owning your own platform and creating your own space on the internet.

My goals here are simple: Write something every weekday. Be provocative about creativity. Spark feats of imagination. And lead a charge back towards making interesting things for their own sake, not merely for clicks or likes or influence.

Hello world.