On Living and Writing into the Dark

The full introduction to "Writing at the Wellspring"

Aug 18, 2024

∙ Paid

Dear Living Dark readers,

“I invite you to turn with me to the matter of writing, creativity, waking up, and the question of what they all have to do with each other, and of how finding out the unique answer in your own life can tell you who you really are and what you’re really here to do.”

Those words are from the final paragraph of the introduction to the book I’m now writing. With this post, I begin serializing that book for paid subscribers, starting with the complete text of the introduction. As you know, I have previously shared the overview, table of contents, and chapter summaries, as written for the book proposal that I’m developing (and that’s now all but finished) for submitting to literary agents. You can read those to get a sense of the whole book’s scope and message for writers, artists, and spiritual seekers.

Those of you who have read my earliest posts from the fall of 2022 when I launched this newsletter will recognize much of this introduction. However, I have also combined TLD content with other writings from elsewhere, and have rewritten the text in various places. This has been my practice throughout the manuscript, which, as I have said, represents a massive reorganization, rewriting, and recasting of my essays, combined with newly written and previously unpublished material, to produce a coherent book. With these posts, including the ones where I share portions of the book proposal, I’m letting you look behind the curtain before this book has found a home with a publisher.

Writing at the Wellspring has developed quite a creative-energetic charge as I’ve gone to work on it in earnest over the past three months, and especially over the past three or four weeks. Believe it or not, my first-ever case of COVID-19, which knocked me off my feet for more than a week in July, somehow catalyzed my daemon and led to an eruption of motivation and an upwelling of creative energy that has not abated since then. As I said, the manuscript is now more than ninety percent complete, and ninety percent of the work to get it there, including the writing of new things to accompany the creative rewriting and high-level organizing of existing things, has occurred within the past month. So has the writing of the book proposal, which, at 7,500 words of major density (plus another several thousand words of text from sample chapters), represents a significant effort in its own right.

Never let yourself assume that your past experiences with your daemon muse have given you a clear and comfortable knowledge of how it’s going to want to work with you in the future. Thomas Ligotti once told an interviewer that his muse is sickness of the mind and the body. For the first time in my life, in association with this particular project, I share his experience of the latter

Warm regards,

P.S. I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which helps local, independent bookstores thrive in the age of ecommerce. This means I’ll earn a commission if you click through one of the book links in this post and make a purchase.