Three years ago, when I launched the previous incarnation of this site, I wrote a brief history of my authorial presence on the web and the evolutionary stages it has gone through. Here is a recounting of that history, bringing it up to the present.

I originally launched my website in 2009 as a static HTML site. Its design remained unchanged for the next eight years.

In 2017, feeling that the original had grown stale, I rebuilt the site in a new form. That version lasted for six years.

Then came the 2023 reconstruction: a sleeker, blog-centered site that I designed to make it easier for me to share news, updates, and occasional writings alongside information about my books and other work.

Apparently, this website has a habit of periodically molting. This time it happened a little ahead of schedule.

That isn’t because the previous site failed. In fact, it served my writing well. But websites are snapshots of how we understand our own work at a particular moment in time, and during the past three years, the shape of my work, and my understanding of how its various strands belong together, has continued to evolve.

Since that last relaunch, I have published a short ebook of essays titled Transmitting Vision, the second volume of my journals, and Writing at the Wellspring. I have continued writing about horror, religion, creativity, consciousness, and the strange territory where they overlap, including the fact and phenomenon of the examined writer’s life. Other projects have taken shape behind the scenes.

But the largest change at this new version of my website is not a new book or even a new site design.

After almost exactly four years, I have decided to bring my newsletter The Living Dark to a close. I launched it on Substack with its inaugural post on September 14, 2022, as a home for essays and reflections on many of the subjects that have occupied me throughout my writing life. Over time, it developed its own identity, energy, and readership, and became the primary place where I pursued those interests online.

But at some point, maintaining The Living Dark as a separate named publication alongside MattCardin.com began to feel like dividing a body of work that increasingly wanted to be whole. My books, essays, reflections, and evolving creative preoccupations have always come from the same source, and separating them between two online identities eventually came to feel arbitrary and unnecessary. What’s more, on a practical level, the divided presence created a practical drain on my focus and energy.

So, The Living Dark is ending, but its animating impulse remains. Basically, I’m bringing it home.

The energy, inspiration, and intent that went into TLD will now continue here, under my own name, as part of a single online presence. I have conceived this site not simply as a blog with some supporting pages, but as my authorial home, a place where my books and other writings stand at the center, where you can explore my fiction and nonfiction, and where my bibliography, current projects, interviews, appearances, news, ongoing essays, and occasional shorter reflections can coexist without dividing the stream or getting in each other’s way.

The short description at the top of the home page now reads:

Live into the dark. Books and essays on creative calling, spiritual awakening, and the darkly numinous.

That currently the simplest account of what I do, and this reimagined author site represents the place where those identities and interests are gathered.

If you’ve followed my work through one or more of the site’s previous lives, or through The Living Dark—or even through my earlier online project, the blog The Teeming Brain, which is also coming home here (see its archive)—thank you for continuing to visit. If you’re encountering my work, and me, for the first time, welcome. I hope the new structure makes it pleasantly easy to wander around, discover something new, and find your way further in.

You can sign up to receive new writing and publication updates as they appear.

MattCardin.com has changed forms several times since 2009, and so have I. And when I put it this way, I find that I remind myself accidentally—and distinctly—of something Andrew W.K. said during a now-famous (or notorious, and certainly bizarre) free-form lecture and Q&A in London in 2008.

The event wasn’t billed as an explanation of the persistent internet rumors that Andrew W.K. was not really singer and musician Andrew W.K., or at least that he was not the same person who had burst onto the scene under that name with a debut album in 2001. The rumors held that the current Andrew W.K. was instead a hired actor who had replaced the original. But at one point during the lecture, Andrew—or “Andrew”—seemed to speak directly to the matter. What he said, depending on how you take it, sounds evasive, incoherent, cryptic, or deep. Or maybe all of these at once:

I’m actually not Andrew W.K. I’m not. I’m not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album. . . . I’m not that same person. And I don’t just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way. It’s not the same person at all. Do I look the same as that person? What I mean is that, since that time, I have changed. And for any of you that happened to be there during that time, perhaps you have changed as well. And I would like to think that we’re not the same people at all—and again, not just conceptually, but very literally, we’re not the same. I’m a completely different entity.

While I’m not claiming that this singularly strange statement is something I can simply appropriate as my own, I am definitely saying, well . . . something.

In any event, my online presence, too, is now a completely different entity, one that consolidates formerly separate but parallel strands into what you now see. And maybe that’s what an author’s website ought to do anyway: not stand as a frozen monument, but change its shape in accordance with the ever-shifting shape of the work itself.

It’s good to have you here. I invite you to subscribe if you’d like to receive new writing, publication news, and updates.