Today is the official publication date for What the Daemon Said. John Shirley calls it “a fine, wide-ranging exploration of the deepest wellsprings of nightmare and chthonic revelation.” Laird Barron calls it “a treasure trove for fans and scholars of weird fiction.” Brian Keene calls it “a crucial deep dive into some of the darkest,…
Category: Writing & Creativity
Should I start a Substack? Or a Patreon?
I’m seeking input from my Teeming Brain readers on a decision about my online future as a writer. On the one hand, I’m thinking of launching a Substack about the daimon muse. It would be a blog-slash-newsletter on the practical and philosophical work of triangulating the inner genius at the nexus of creativity, consciousness, and…
Authors move in an entire universe of their own creation
This lovely authorial vision from Flaubert is also applicable to life as lived within the nondual understanding of self and world (which is where I myself live): It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man…
WHAT THE DAEMON SAID: Cover, TOC, and Publication Date
Today I received word from Hippocampus Press that my nonfiction collection What the Daemon Said: Essays on Weird Fiction, Film, and Philosophy is scheduled for publication on April 26. Preorders are available now. The beautiful cover is by Dan Sauer. Click to order. BLURBS: “For my money, Matt Cardin is the most interesting voice in…
The Myth of Persephone and the Cycle of Creativity
Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, Iâve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I wonât be including…
“Everything in this mansion is a horror”
Yesterday I posted the transcript of a nightmare that I suffered in 2003 and recorded in my personal journal, which I’m currently turning into a manuscript for publication later this year. I characterized that nightmare as the most narratively developed dream that I’ve ever experienced. Today, in the interest of accuracy, I’ll point out that…
A nightmare that was better than the story I made from it
The idea of publishing my 30-year private journal that I recently mentioned here is becoming a reality. The first volume will be published later this year by S. T. Joshi’s Sarnath Press. For weeks I’ve been typing like mad to produce a manuscript from mounds of old notebooks. And I’ve been coming across many things…
Writing a Novel: Slow, Underwhelming, One Sentence at a Time
A rather neat novelist origin story from science writer Sara Goudarzi, author of the soon-to-be-published The Almond in the Apricot. Her insights into the creative process and the writer’s craft that she had to learn when transitioning from writing science journalism to prose fiction ring true: While I wrote several science articles a week, a…
On potentially publishing my private journal
If I published my private journal from the past 30 years, would there be any interest among my readers? I’m asking for a reason and seeking honest feedback. I journaled obsessively from age 18 to around 33, with an especially prolific period occurring in the first decade after I graduated from college, and currently I…
A Blessed Silence: On Solving Writer’s Block by Accepting It
Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own…