The story behind Nowhere is partly autobiographical.
I’ve liked storytelling for years. For example, when I was twelve, tried to write a “novel” for Nanowrimo. I called the story “Peaceful, Clever, Nowhere” -- it was about a twelve year old girl who lived in a hotel in a desert, and everyday, she wanted desperately to leave the hotel but, she couldn’t figure out how. How to drive, how to get more independance. In the story, there was only one gas station close by, and it wasn’t close enough to appear as anything but “a pencil speck on the horizon line” through her hotel bedroom window.
It was the start of that story, and the start of a feeling I would go on to feel much more frequently in the year 2020.
Nowhere.net came to be out of a “world-building” prompt I had for my second semester graphic design class, Sophomore year. I created it in my childhood home, the same home I started writing "Peaceful, Clever, Nowhere" in. It felt fitting to set my world "nowhere in particular" which is very much where I’ve felt I’ve lived for the past year and a half by being entirely online and remotely from my university and in a completely different state, since I'm an out-of-state student.
I set out wanting to visually capture the feeling of being nowhere, and if you've made this far in the story, I hope you've enjoyed your visit to Nowhere.
~Celia Ruley