If you’ve arrived here from The Living Dark, welcome. If you’ve been visiting MattCardin.com for years, welcome back. And if you’ve come across this site without knowing anything about either, I’m glad you found your way here.

This is now the central home of my writing online. My books, essays, shorter reflections, news, and other creative work are coming together under my own name, in the place that has served as my author website since 2009.

I have written about the history and reasons for this change in my earlier welcome post. What I want to do here is give you a glimpse of what all is shaping up here, which you can follow as it develops.

Returning to The Teeming Brain

One present project that is drawing me back into my past: a substantial memoir essay about The Teeming Brain, the blog I launched in 2006 and continued until 2022.

It began while I was teaching high school English in rural Missouri. Over the next sixteen years, TTB turned into the place where I followed an expanding constellation of interests. I also conducted and published interviews with fellow writers (most of them, but not all, in the horror field), encountered readers and fellow writers, and eventually brought in a group of contributors. Much of what happened in my creative and professional life during those years either passed through the blog or grew out of it in some way.

Writing about that experience now is bringing me back to the feeling of discovering something through the act of pursuing it. “Self-discovery in public” is the phrase I keep returning to. I didn’t know what The Teeming Brain would become when I started it. Now I find that I'm still in the act of understanding what it meant.

I plan to share a substantial portion of the essay here and probably publish the whole thing in the next issue of The Living Dark Reader, which I will say more about in time. Notably, selected writings from the original blog will also gradually become available through the archives.

Serious writing in the age of AI

I’m also working on a book about writing and artificial intelligence, growing out of questions that I have explored in essays and conversations with readers.

What happens when a technology can produce believably human-sounding prose on demand, even as the real work of a writer irreducibly involves discovering and articulating something that can only emerge through the actual act of writing? Where does useful assistance end and authorial abdication begin? How can we recognize the difference in our own practice?

The principle guiding my thinking right now is simple to state, and indeed, it seems like many people are coming around to it and stating it in their various ways: AI may assist the work, but it must not become the source of the work. Understanding what that means in actual use is more complicated, and the process of writing a book about it has, for me, itself become part of thinking about it and clarifying it all for myself. Maybe when I publish it, my grappling with the issue will clarify it for others. I’ll be sharing more as it develops.

Music, too

Something I haven’t previously announced is that I’ll be making an album of my original instrumental music available to subscribers.

I recorded it some years ago, and I look forward to sharing more from this other part of my creative life. Writing and music have both been ways for me to hear and follow an inner creative impulse and find out what it wants to say and become. Bringing them now into the same home feels appropriate to the larger purpose of this move.

I'll give more details when the album is ready to download. And not only that, but details about a limited number of physical compact discs that I have available, complete with cover artwork by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Jason Van Hollander.

The ongoing work

Alongside these projects, I’ll continue to publish new essays and shorter notes on creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, and the examined writing life. There will be book news, publication announcements, and some returns to older work as I republish material you've probably never seen before. I’ll also, as mentioned, be writing separately about the future of The Living Dark Reader, my quarterly PDF journal for slow, immersive, quiet reading away from the hectic turmoil of the internet. It will indeed continue, even though my Living Dark newsletter has now ended.

The description on the home page for this site condenses all these interests into a few words: “Books and essays on creative calling, spiritual awakening, and the darkly numinous.” What holds those themes together, for me, is the experience of being drawn toward something whose full meaning isn’t visible yet, and learning to follow it into the dark.

If you’ve come over as a Living Dark email subscriber, your free subscription continues here; you don’t need to sign up again. And your existing access to the Substack archive remains in place independently. If you’re new, you’re welcome to subscribe to receive future writing and updates by email.

Thank you for reading, and for sharing this journey into . . . wherever it leads.