Will Ludwigsen

Stories of Weird Mystery

Author: Will Ludwigsen (Page 1 of 10)

I Won! I Won! (Not Exactly)

July 20, 2025 /

As you may have already heard, my novella A Scout is Brave was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award recognizing excellence in works of the psychological fantastic written by wryly cynical people with serious doubts about the decency of humanity.

Yeah, it’s a niche award, but it’s a niche made for me!

Last night in a ceremony gala at Readercon, a star-studded panel of presenters announced the winners, and alas, A Scout is Brave was not among them. Per the organization’s bylaws, I was frog-marched from the ballroom and stoned (with stones, not the other kind) in the town square.

As many of you know, I am doomed by my Scandinavian heritage toward dark contemplation, and I’m sure people close to me have been dreading my inevitable tailspin.

You know what, though? No tailspin.

As cliche as it sounds, the real award was being nominated in the first place: a sign of esteem from the jury of the award plus some extra recognition for the book. Many people approached me at Readercon to tell me they loved the story, including friends and mentors and even a few strangers.

When one of my favorite writers told me she had her fingers crossed for me, that was the win. When my MFA thesis advisor stood around with me after the ceremony commiserating, that was the win. When the award coordinator handed me my nominee’s rock, that was the win.

I write because I’m still mostly the deranged little boy who liked seeing adults bemused or freaked out by his stories (I wasn’t picky then and I’m still not). Any sign that I’ve reached a reader is a win.

A Scout is Brave has taken a long, long trek through the wilderness from first draft to this very moment, supported by many guides and fellow hikers for whom I’ll always be thankful. I’m grateful for all of you who critiqued its drafts, listened to it at campfires, encouraged me not to let it die, left reviews for it on websites, bought extra copies for your family members, and dressed as its characters for Hallowe’en.

Scholars of the ancients believe this tableau may have had religious significance.

Though I’m usually a rationalist, I’m not above a little superstition every now and then to hedge my bets. In my back pocket during the ceremony, I carried one of my old Boy Scout patches, along with another I found while going through the box of keepsakes: my mother’s patch from her career as a paramedic.

I thought they’d help curry favor with any allies pulling for me in the Great Beyond.

And yes, they absolutely worked.

Thanks again to all of you as well as the administrators of the awards, and congratulations to all of the nominees and winners!

Postcard Story: Build Your Own Pirate’s Cave!

June 21, 2025 /

The editors, staff, and legal team at Boys’ Popular Invention magazine wish to retract our article from the December 1949 issue entitled “Digging a Pirate’s Cave in Your Backyard” and apologize to the family of Gerald Looley. Though this retraction is part of a considerable financial settlement, our condolences are sincere for the loss of this imaginative and industrious young man.

Hi Sibley’s article describing how to dig a pit in one’s backyard for use as a secret lair neglected to mention several key considerations for safety and courtesy:

  • Be sure to ask your dad if it is permissible to dig a twenty foot by twenty foot hole in the yard BEFORE beginning the project.
  • If opting for motorized digging equipment, be sure to read all manuals and safety instructions THOROUGHLY.
  • Please wear protective gear like goggles and a helmet. Failing that, at least wear shoes.
  • Note that certain areas of the country have a high water table and flooding may ensue.
  • Note that other areas of the country have radon gas, leeched arsenic, and other chemical hazards lurking in the soil.
  • Note that regardless of how “cool” it is, do not excavate on an Indian reservation or an active archaeological site.
  • Be warned that the borders of cemeteries are not always marked clearly, especially for the graves of apostates. Report any human remains to your local police department.
  • Remember that the line between “scrap” and “about to be used” lumber is drawn by the construction company, not passersby.
  • VENTILATION IS NOT OPTIONAL. We say again: the air shafts and chimney are not decorative features of the Pirate’s Den.
  • The Pirate’s Den is not meant to provide shelter from atomic attack, nor is it meant to bear the weight of a 1940 Ford Deluxe.
  • All forms of fire require caution, including candles.
  • In the list of required lumber, please note that several of the measurements are in feet, not inches. This is especially important for the reinforcing beams.
  • The word “pirate” is meant playfully, not as an indication to use your project for criminal activity.
  • Your mother is not a “wench.” Neither is Sister Dolores at Sacred Heart Grammar School.
  • It is not recommended that boys brew “grog.”
  • Though a clever re-use of materials, we do not suggest adapting our Potato Cannon from the August 1947 issue as a sawed-off blunderbuss.
  • We advise builders to step out from their Pirate’s Den unarmed when ordered to do so by the police. A sawed-off blunderbuss counts as “armed.”
  • Local police not versed in the history of the Pirate Age may misinterpret a cry of, “Avast, ye cowardly Lobsterbacks! Damned be me to Hell if you take me alive!” as a threat.
  • If you are unable to heed these legally-required warnings, we do tip our tricorn to young men who fade from this mortal realm by saying, “’Tis better…to die a pirate…than a bootlick.”

A Scout is Brave Nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award!

June 9, 2025 /

One surprising thing to know about me is that I have a horrible pervasive fear that the authors I most admire would think I was a putz if they met me or read my work, Shirley Jackson perhaps most of all.

“Well, I’ll hand it to you, Will: you’ve toned down about 10% of the inherent fascism in Scouting.”

HOWEVER…

I am very honored that my novella A Scout is Brave (heard of it?) has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

While not actually judged by Shirley herself, I do believe superstitiously that she uses her witch-like powers from beyond the grave to influence the jury who does, and I’m so very pleased that they enjoyed it enough to give me the nod (with or without her otherworldly shenanigans).

I’ll be attending the awards gala at Readercon in Boston (July 18-20)!

ICFA 2025: March 19 – 22, Orlando

February 23, 2025 /

Once again, I’m honored to be an invited guest of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), where I’ll be doing a reading on Thursday, March 20, at 8:30am!

You may call that reading slot “too fucking early to wake up on a Thursday,” but I call it, “setting the tone for a weekend of amazing readings and discussions of wondrous literature.”

Drop by the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside to hear me and better writers read from our works!

Truman Catpote: 2011 – 2025

February 12, 2025 /

Truman, our most reclusive cat, has gone onward tonight to what my grandfather would call “the Church Triumphant,” and I hope we gave him a life that he enjoyed in his own weird way.

Truman glamour shot

On a chilly evening in late December of 2011, Aimee and I were getting into our car after dinner at Panera when we heard a kitten mewing. After some rustling around in the bushes, we found a small black-brown ball of fluff who could fit in one hand.

I’d like to say that we fell in love with that cat immediately and brought him home, but we tried first to find him a different one. We were already flush with cats and we weren’t sure we could take care of yet another one…but eventually we discovered that we could.

Truman cryptid shot
The earliest known photo of Truman

He was a skittish little boy, though perhaps not so young: the vet who neutered him told us that his teeth were too developed to be younger than four months. We had no idea what he lived on or where before we found him at Panera. Rats? Lizards? It couldn’t only have been bread.

We called him Truman Cat-pote, continuing our theme of cats named for authors we liked. He seemed to like us more or less in return, though his raging anxiety disorder kept him from curling up on our laps for long. He preferred when we were lying down, and throughout the night, he’d paw through Aimee’s hair or bat either of us on the cheek for attention. He didn’t settle when we’d pet him, pacing back and forth instead.

Edgar smothering Truman with love

In that way, Truman was our most Norman-like cat: skittish, rumpled, inconveniently weird, sometimes annoying, but still somehow needy for affection. When he got used to friends who visited us, he’d make an appearance in the living room like a cryptid, and a Truman sighting was always an honor for them.

We managed to get him to the vet maybe twice because he would writhe and fight when we tried to place him in a carrier, clawing at your head like a facehugger from Alien. I feel terrible that we didn’t get him better medical care, but he was impossible to pill or otherwise medicate, and we were terrified that his heart would explode on the way to the doctor.

Truman not giving a fuck about anything

He seemed content to live in our house and be weird, sometimes leaving a tooth or a clump of fur for rent.

We don’t have many stories about Truman. It wasn’t until we installed cat-calming diffusers in outlets around the house that he began to lounge in the front window or on the couch. Mostly he hung out in the bedroom like a strange stoner roommate, not contributing much but amiably showing up to be social when it suited him.

We had no idea what he wanted from us, so we did the best we could by sitting still and petting him until he dozed off.

Truman lying on someone's chest, as he liked it
This is often what you’d wake up to with Truman lurking around.

For the last few weeks, he’d been eating less and less, and today when we tried to take him to the litter box, he couldn’t quite stand on his back legs. Harlan had taken to sleeping near him as a guardian this week, and we knew this evening that Truman was ready for whatever’s next.

Truman, second glamor shot

I’m sure my mother is waiting to greet him when he crosses over, though God knows how she’ll catch him. Maybe there’s no anxiety disorder over the Rainbow Bridge.

In his memory, take some time over the next day or so to show some love to a challenging weirdo in your life who doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Like Truman, they need and want it anyway.

I’m Big with the Presbyterians

January 26, 2025 /

I’m pleased to announce that there is one final stop on the book tour for A Scout is Brave:

7pm on Wednesday, February 5th
Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina

And yes, I’ll take questions at this time.

Cover for the book A Scout is Brave by Will Ludwigsen

Are the faculty and students at Presbyterian College aware of what you write?

They are, and they’ve even invited me back after I visited once before a few years ago! It’s a gorgeous campus full of smart, friendly people, and the audience questions were some of the best I’ve ever gotten.

I’m greatly looking forward to it!

What will take place at 7pm on Wednesday, February 5th?

A reading and Q&A with students and anyone else who shows up. It’s part of their Meet an Author Before They Die Forgotten and Alone in a Gutter series.

Is this really the end of the book tour for A Scout is Brave?

I mean, until the next book or story comes out, I guess the book tour is technically ongoing wherever I am. This is the final planned event, at least.

Blue Skies All the Way, David

January 16, 2025 /

David Lynch’s family just announced his passing, a few days after his evacuation from his home during the fires in Los Angeles. I’d be surprised if the two aren’t related.

Like a lot of us stranded in America’s cultural backwaters of the late 1980s, I was introduced to Lynch through his television show Twin Peaks. My friend Norman caught onto him before I did and loaned me fuzzy recordings of the show on videotape. That was the perfect surreal way to enter that world because they required effort to watch—you had to lean close to the television to make out what was going on sometimes, like you were burrowing into another reality.

It’s hard to tell which of the creative powers behind Twin Peaks wrote the lines and actions of the characters that inspired me so much as a high schooler—Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, or Lynch himself—but I know that Lynch broke through the ice of normalcy for them to be more creative than they might have been.

He did that for me too. I was under some pressure to grow up and be more normal when I encountered Lynch, but his loud and courageous oddness helped me slip away from its grasp.

Over the years I sometimes found myself annoyed with his creative choices, many of which seemed chosen to alienate viewers and demonstrate how silly it was of us to fall in love with a story, but I always admired his commitment to pursuing his vision wherever it led.

For years, I wanted to meet him and pitch a story that could salve the open wound he left at the end of the second season of Twin Peaks. Of course, so did half of Generation X. The last thing he’d have wanted from us is a solution or an ending to a mystery.

Lynch was a fellow Boy Scout, though he made it all the way to Eagle. Many of his more annoying fans saw him as a nihilistic edgelord trolling the mundanes, but I suspect that like me, he was a shell-shocked idealist who was hypnotized by the encroachment of darkness.

I think I was just a little more fascinated by what to do about it than he was, which I guess is a gift from the other storytelling spirit animal for my generation, Steven Spielberg.

Thanks to Lynch, I investigated meditation and adopted its practice (though not the form he espoused, Transcendental Meditation). That alone is a wonderful legacy in my life and creative work, and I’m grateful for it.

For a person so committed to following a mystic vision, Lynch was certainly very blue collar about it: you sit down, you see what you see, and you make a mess while making it as real as you can. I always loved his videos from his workshop, chain-smoking and squinting through a window dressed in paint-splattered clothes, providing a weather report.

In those videos, he’d often wish us “blue skies all the way” in our creative work, which is what I wish for him in whatever mystery he’s now investigating.

Do Not Engage the Fuzz!

October 5, 2024 /

Some people, apparently not me, can sit down and hack their way through a project from beginning to end, perhaps with some obstacles but largely through perseverance.

I, on the other hand, must contend with the Fuzz.

The Fuzz is an incorporeal cloud of particles, primordial quarks of uncertainty and terror, looming in front of almost everything I try to accomplish. You can’t see through the Fuzz or really much around it, and if you try to go through, you are pushed back with the firm indifference of nature.

NGC 1333 – Perseus Molecular Cloud
Pictured: The Fuzz
(Actually, a NASA image of NGC 1333)

I don’t know what the Fuzz is or where it comes from, but I know I can kind of feel it on the inside of my skull when I get too close. It does no good to think too deeply about the Fuzz.

You cannot directly engage the Fuzz.

What you can do with the Fuzz is quietly and persistently probe its edges and create little outposts of what you know. They’re usually widely flung at first, but eventually they begin to bridge together and their accumulating mass shrinks the Fuzz to its true shape.

You discover what’s behind the Fuzz through parallax, like calculating the diameter of Pluto by measuring how long it takes Charon to transit across it, or like solving a crossword puzzle by answering first the clues you know for sure and then they ones you’re less sure of.

The Fuzz rejects all attempts at certainty and pre-imposed structure. Your only hope is to surround and compress it slowly, improvising with the push it gives you back.

They key to creative endeavors is to not look directly into the Fuzz or let it scare you but to hold it in mutual abeyance, like coming across an alligator on a walk through the woods: “You’re there and I’m here, so don’t mind me.”

That probably sounds mystical, but it’s actually the most concrete model I’ve ever contrived for how I work best, explaining why I seldom start at the beginning or end at the end, or why plots and outlines don’t help me. I have to sneak up on my subjects and improvise against that uncertainty.

In other words, you can’t make the uncertain certain by just thinking about it.

Necronomicon Tampa: 9/27 – 29!

September 21, 2024 /

The tour for A Scout is Brave continues with my yearly appearance at my “home” convention, Necronomicon in Tampa.

Join us at the Embassy Suites USF for great programming and gaming, plus these Will-adjacent panels:

  • Friday, 9pm: The Short Fiction Scene Today
  • Saturday, 12pm: Internet Disinformation
  • Saturday, 1pm: It Takes a Village (help with writing)
  • Saturday, 2pm: Our Fascination with the Other
  • Saturday, 8pm: Lovecraftian Influences

That’s a busy schedule for sure, plus I’ll be manning my author’s alley table with books for sale:

  • Friday, 3:30pm – 5pm
  • Saturday: 9am – 11:45am

I hope to see you there!

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