The Unified Path of your Daemon

Uncovering your core purpose in writing and reading

Dear Living Dark reader,

What are you really, principally about as a writer? And not only that, but what are you principally about as a reader?

These paired questions have become more important to me over the years. And they should be important to you, too. Because the two roles are not separate. Your core orientation in each role, that of writer and that of reader, has significant implications for both your relationship to the books and writers you cherish and your relationship to the things you write and the people who read them.

For me, figuring this out over a span of many years has been a slow discipline of self-understanding. It has become evident over time that my authorial role, first in the form of the horror stories that I wrote and published from 1998 until a few years ago, and then in my writings on creativity and spiritual awakening, has been to articulate and reinforce what my readers already, on some deep level, know. To restate the primal intuitions about writing, art, se…