Matt Cardin's Blog

Dear Living Dark reader,

At long last, I can share the final cover design for Writing at the Wellspring. Preorders will open soon (I’ll send details later this month).

Many of you have watched this book take shape through essays here over the past three years. Now you can see what it has grown into.

Here’s how I’ve officially described the book for its publication page:

Return to the source of your creativity.

In a world of noise and distraction, creativity calls us back to silenc...

Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius is now fully typeset and laid out, and the proofs have been through a couple of rounds of corrections. Here’s a two-page spread from the introduction. It’s a section where I talk about why art matters in difficult times. Following your muse or daemon and engaging in creative pursuits can seem trivial in an age bristling with real-world crises. But I argue that this impression is mistaken, as ar...

Dear Living Dark reader,

In an age when a superficial surrealism pervades so many of the arts—movies, paintings, books, video games, digital art—courtesy of our collective pop cultural fascination with fantasy and the fantastic, it’s easy to forget or overlook that Surrealism, as a distinct and influential early-twentieth-century movement in art and literature, didn’t originally mean just a weird and warped style of writing or paintin...

Dear Living Dark reader,

I’m having an interesting time with my first-ever excursion into the territory of self-publishing with Writing at the Wellspring. From the start of my writing career around the turn of the millennium, my books have all been traditionally published, with the sole exception of A Course in Demonic Creativity, which I felt prodded by my daemon muse to release into the wild as a free PDF in 2011. It has remained available in ...

Dear Living Dark reader,

I’m writing this to you with just a single point to make or perspective to pass along: The edge of the living moment is what creativity is all about. In fact, it’s what everything is about. Because, in point of fact, only the present moment is real. We commonly forget this and obscure it from ourselves by (mis)identifying with our thoughts, which pretend to deal with non-existent things that we call “the past” and “the future....

Dear Living Dark reader,

In early 2023, I recorded an interview with Dr. Jerry L. Martin, whom I have been friends with at a distance for around 15 years now, ever since he and I first met online as I was writing A Course in Demonic Creativity and he was writing God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher. The interview’s focus was on the remarkable story behind—and implications of—Jerry’s book. Today I’m republishing it to call it ...

Dear Living Dark reader,

Writing these words feels like stirring the dark waters at the bottom of the ocean. Has it really been since March when I last spoke to you in this space? Indeed, it has.

I won’t spend a lot of time on rehashing my reasons for putting The Living Dark on pause, since you can read or reread them for yourself. I’ll simply express my hope and wish that things have been good fo...

Dear friends,

Although The Living Dark is officially on hiatus, and will remain so for a while longer, I wanted to briefly step out of the shadows to share some news.

What the Daemon Said, my collection of essays and interviews on horror, creativity, and the numinous, is being released in Spanish this April by Dilatando Mentes Editorial. The Spanish edition is titled Lo que el diablo me contó, and it features a striking new design as part of their Línea Paraíso Perdido collection, with cover and i...

Dear friends,

Although The Living Dark is officially on hiatus, and will remain so for a while longer, I wanted to briefly step out of the shadows to share some news.

What the Daemon Said, my collection of essays and interviews on horror, creativity, and the numinous, is being released in Spanish this April by Dilatando Mentes Editorial. The Spanish edition is titled Lo que el diablo me contó, and it features a striking new design as part of their Línea Paraíso Perdido collection, with cover and i...

Dear friends,

Beginning today, the Living Dark is going on indefinite hiatus. I will not be publishing any new posts for the foreseeable future. I have paused paid subscriptions, meaning those of you with that status will not be charged any more payments, nor will new paid subscriptions be available. However, you will retain ongoing access to the full TLD post archive. Free subscribers will see no change, other than a new silence.

Don’t worry; nothing is wrong. There has simply been an unexpected ...