8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: professional growth

Chapter List

  • Professional Games 

    In early 2025 I founded a game studio.

    Sounds impressive, no? In a way it is like any other clever idea: you give an idea a name and send it off in a direction and it becomes important and meaningful. It becomes work.

    Why did I found a game studio?

    Because I write code.  My profession for two decades has involved technology and systems and building things on computers. The gaming industry may seem lighthearted and playful, but at the end of the day games are just more code (and art and music and databases and stories) built inside of a computer.

    I spent the next five months working on the soul and systems of a simulation-meets-cozy style game and pushing it through various iterations of functionality until I was actually able to load it onto one of those handheld gaming PCs and sit on the couch playing my buggy (but functional) game.

    It’s now mid-2026 as I write this and the game development has been stalled for about a year. I’ve poked at it. Prodded it. Added tiny nudges to the system. But stalled, really.

    I bring it up here because it comes to mind when I think of the idea I’m trying to get across in this chapter of the blog: creativity isn’t just a whim. It can be work and a product and an invention that may someday wind up in a store being sold to people who would pay for it.

    And on days that I’m being particularly honest I think I would tell you that the game development didn’t stall for lack of time or motivation or direction. It probably stalled because the profession that morphed in a newfound passion quietly transformed back into a profession when I wasn’t looking. And it took me a few months to get my head around that idea.

  • Hard Numbers

    Here’s the thing about a job that meany people overlook: everything ultimately needs to lead back to some kind of measurable, fungible value. Ah capitalism, you nasty freak.

    I managed a team of web developers for half a decade and as manager I had a lot of tasks—but not the least of these (and in fact arguably one of the most consistent and time consuming of these) was tracking metrics. 

    I had to put numbers to productivity. I had to match quantifiable costs against measured returns, make graphs of employee time spent per tasks, public page interactions, project cost recovery models, marketing investment return projections. Everything had to to be tracked, measured, plotted, and understood.

    Now that I’ve been create something of my own, for the sake of art, it has been too easy to fall into this same trap: measuring word counts, tracking web stats and search engine placements, allocating resources to audience building and working to balance effort with return based on numbers, even if some of those numbers are only tracked in my head.

    When your profession and passion collide, what is there to do?

    How do you stand arms length from the quantifiable measures of your art, words, and music as demanded by the professional side of the craft—often inseparable and important—and yet still find the mental space to think of it as a qualitative act measured in vibes and feels and beauty? 

  • Gifts Dangers 

    For me, personally, I have often struggled to keep a clear line between the work I do for money and the work I do for fun.  That is not to say that the creative aspects of my job have been particularly lucrative in my life, but the overlap of my creative talents has often benefited employers–and vice versa, my hobbies have often benefited people and companies I don’t actually work for (or get paid by…)

    Coincidentally, I was reminded of this recently: a photo I took on a running adventure with my friends found its way through a bit of sharing in a corporate newsletter that landed back on my inbox: weird thing that, getting your own work sent back to you by a company who is using it for something they didn’t inform you about or pay you for.

    Legal blurriness aside (this is not a post about that, really, and if any company was going to benefit from my work in this way this is one of about three companies in the whole world I would look away and say, okay, you guys have given me so much over the years, blah, blah, blah, I’m gonna ignore this one… but I digress.)

    Creativity is a gift, but it can be a dangerous minefield of people taking what you can do for granted. It happens routinely. You become the guy with the camera. The dude who can make websites. The man to go to if someone needs something sketched. We all have those things: plumbers are going get asked about leaky faucets, doctors are gonna get asked about that mole on my back and chefs are going to be expected to bring the best dish to a potluck. Navigating the overlap is the hard part for all of us.

    Under the category of Gifts & Dangers, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Amateur Appeal 

    I recently wrote a piece on this blog about breaking from the conformity of rules when we create, suggesting in my two-hundred word blog-conforming limit that stepping outside of the guardrails presented by this idea of your art needing to be so-called “commercial viable” might be a means to escape from a constraint imposed on your feeling of accomplishment and ability.

    I was thinking about this in a different context: the amateur effect.

    That is to say, sometimes amateurs create things that break rules not because they want to break away from constraints of the form, and also not because they are unencumbered by a debt to the patronage of a person or system that limits professionals, but rather, simply because they simply haven’t internalized those same rules that might otherwise limit them. They break rules because they didn’t know they existed, and occasionally stumble upon something worth considering through that process.

    It is, of course, far from given that amateurs can de facto make interesting contributions to an art just because they are new to the craft, and even if we could, it could also be argued that accidental creation is neither consistency nor necessarily something to be proud of.

    But it is interesting, the notion that I might take up a new hobby in a style of music, or mode of painting, or craft of prose and by virtue of accident make something not just reasonably good, but rule-bending enough for someone better at the effort to consider their cherished rules and skills as something that can, on occasion, be bent a little bit.

  • Respect Yourself

    I had a recent reminder that the biggest struggle in finding your creative (and likewise, your professional) voice, more often than not is remembering to respect yourself.

    Generally it is so obvious a thing when you write it or when you read it, but often it is the least obvious thought when we find ourselves mired in a situation or relationship where respect has been compromised.

    If you are one of the lucky few who is bolstered by self-confidence and unhindered by self-doubt, congratulations. Because I would wager the bulk of us need the occasional nudging reminder that when it comes to your creative hearts and souls no one is looking out for you and your interests, your time, your experience and expertise, nor you as a human being with the same attention and care as you are.

    Respect yourself.

    Guard your talents.

    Own your schedule.

    Stand by your skills. 

    And don’t work with people who either disrespect or take advantage of any of those things for their imbalanced benefit.

    But enough whinging… now go make something.