8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: state of the blog

Chapter List

  • Linked Out

    There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.

    If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.

    On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.

    So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.

    That’s not my goal.  Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.

    Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.

    It becomes just more slop.

    But I think I can avoid that.

    After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?

  • Navel Gazing 

    I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by the simple idea that iterative work can lead to huge accomplishments.

    I was sitting down to write this post, pondering a topic, and I noticed that at some point last week I’d passed the one hundred post milestone on this blog.

    Navel gazing could have easily followed, and maybe that’s all this post is. But I’d like to think that it is a self-referential example of my point, too.

    A few times per week for the last five months I’ve sat down with a hot tea and my keyboard and written out a few words on a topic related to the mission of this blog: to talk about the fun and frustration of creative exploration, to poke at the obvious and pry into the obscure, and to generally reflect on the thousands upon thousands of aspects of what it takes to bootstrap oneself into a creative professional life no matter your career stage—the first person perspective version of that.

    And so I write, and often I’ve preached upon the simplest of simple topics: just putting in the work. Doing it. Actually writing, making, or creating—no matter how small or incremental it might seem.

    By example, one of the things I create incrementally is this blog, writing oft disconnected thoughts about the process itself: navel gazing upon navel gazing.

    One hundred posts later my incremental effort sits around forty thousand words: a short book worth of text and ideas posted here for people to read and enjoy. If that’s not something huge from a hundred little iterative efforts I don’t know what is.

  • Deeper Seeking

    What is the meaning of it all?

    Oh sure, some people would be happy to tell you that they have all the answers. Some people will even sell you those answers—for the right price, of course.

    I’m not buying, but it doesn’t mean I am in a position to sell, either.

    As I sweep through my life and close in on my fiftieth birthday later this year, I knew better than to expect I would have figured everything out by this point—but I didn’t figure I would still be this far away from any satisfying answers.

    And the world really does seem in shambles right now, doesn’t it?

    How to fix that? Well. For a few months now I’ve been writing this week-daily blog it has done interesting things to the way I have been thinking about inspiration and personal creativity and motivation to make interesting stuff. It’s valuable to me—in other words. But lately it’s been pretty niche without much room for deeper thoughts on the meaning of life and the other sorts of things I’ve been yearning to write about more, too. Something inside of me said, hmmm, what if it also helped work through something a little more—um—metaphysical?

    Thus, here we are. My haunt. This blog. And I’m expanding a bit.

    I started writing on my list of ideas, and realized I had a lot of ground to cover in any such exploration. To that end, I don’t know exactly where I’m going, but I think I can probably cobble together a compass to help me figure out which way to start walking. 

    My plan is to not only keep writing on creativity and inspiration, but to write more posts on mindfulness, balance, clarity and hope, much of it in the context of work, culture, aging, and trying to find a fit for oneself in society, too. It all seems but a distant dot on an unfamiliar map, but I’m determined to get a little closer with each entry here.