8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: self confidence

Chapter List

  • Eight Clicks

    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.

  • Weightless Words

    Who knows what this site will look like by the time you are reading this post, but as I am writing it I have just launched this blog and, bluntly, it’s using a pretty boring template.

    In deciding on a design with which to start I weighed a single consideration: I wanted the words to be the central focus of what I was making. I was not planning on posting photos or art. I was not linking to videos. I was not trying to wow visitors with a unique and clever design.

    I wanted the words to be the point.

    Me of ten years ago would have clutched his metaphorical pearls—or whatever guys who don’t wear pearls might clutch in such a situation. Use your imagination. As it was back then, perhaps lacking confidence in my ideas or writing, I would merrily post but fill the screen with visual clutter and links and metadata.

    Today, I am boldly posting these words without the flourish of fancy headers and kooky fonts and in doing so perhaps suggesting through their simple form and format that the words are sturdy enough on their own merit.