Stories of Weird Mystery

Author: Will Ludwigsen (Page 1 of 9)

Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Hey, Will! It’s me, Will from the future! Sorry that I look like such a mess, but I was press-ganged like all Liberal Arts majors into picking produce after the Mass Deportations of 2025, and I haven’t gotten this month’s bathwater ration from Nestle yet.

Things could be better, it’s true. They could also be worse. It turns out that dying Boomers are delicious when perfectly seared and coated with crushed peppercorns and Asiago cheese. That’s one of the Republican’s greatest policy achievements, the Waste Not Want Not Initiative.

Hey, I really have only a few minutes; I traded my last precious Ayn Rand Worker’s Scrip to the guy with the time machine for a chance to talk to you.

Yeah, that election you just emerged from could have gone a whole lot better, but really, it’s the few years afterward that everyone fucks up even worse.

Which is why I’m here with some advice.

There’s no question that Trump is the embodied id of America’s worst impulses: a gleefully ignorant, fame-desperate, shit-talking narcissist con artist who has confused the freedom to be a dick with the necessity of it.

And yeah, the world will change in a lot of terrifying ways over the first eleven years of Trump’s term, especially for people you care about who are LGTBQ+, minority, female, or science-minded. Your privilege helps you escape from some of the worst in your compound, at least in the short term, but things go to shit pretty quickly for everyone.

Unfortunately, we were all terrible at differentiating the real shit that was going wrong with the shit that idiots were saying was going on, and that’s how we lost Bigly War I.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d remind everyone in your time of a few important things:

  • There are people who gain money and power by manipulating our fears toward all the wrong things, and while we’re earnestly arguing about what the world SHOULD be like, they’re busy making it what it WILL actually be.
  • Those people are eager for us to sublimate our energy in spaces that don’t really matter like the Internet, where we confuse zingers and indignation with useful action.
  • What power we have at the end of the day is whatever is within the immediate reach of our arms, our votes, and our wallets. The good we do has to start locally. We all want to save the world, but few want to pick up the trash.

Trump is a shit-talker who says deranged and bombastic things partly for attention, partly from senility, and partly as the start of an aggressive negotiation. You should by all means take seriously what he promises…but you should ACT upon what he and his people DO.

He wants you to freak out over what he says so you don’t notice what he does. He’s far from harmless, but he’s far from omnipotent, too. When we anticipated trouble that hadn’t happened yet, we missed the real trouble when it came, the trouble we could actually address.

That’s how they got us in the end.

Noted mythical character Winston Churchill once said on the hill of Golgotha that Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives. We write that in Latin on bathroom stalls when our overseers are too busy watching The Tonight Show with Gutfeld.

One of the few things left to hold onto is that yeah, we flail around a lot, but if we can keep ourselves in the game, we have opportunities to make good on the bullshit we spout about ourselves and our ideals.

Staying in the game is critical for all of you now, and I beg you to place your money and your efforts where it counts, not just screaming into the online void at bots and people who might as well be.

Uh, oh. They’re playing the noon inspirational homily from Marjorie Taylor Greene, so I guess it’s back to work for me.

It’s back to work for you, too.

Do Not Engage the Fuzz!

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!

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!

New Tour Stops for A Scout is Brave

Hey, have you heard I have a book out this year?

If you’re local to Jacksonville and missed the book launch for A Scout is Brave, your second chance is here!

I’ll be reading from the book and answering your pointed questions at the Not Your Skoolastic Book Fair at Happy Medium Books Café on Saturday, October 19th from 1pm to 4pm. They’re a neat new bookstore on Park Street in my historic neighborhood, offering a well-curated selection of great fiction and non-fiction, plus a café.

Also, I’ll be among the (un)usual suspects at Necronomicon in Tampa from September 27 through the 29th where I’ll not only hold forth on panels but also be signing (and selling!) copies at an Authors’ Alley table.

A Scout is Going to Providence

Poster advertising NecronomiCon in Providence.

Hark! My book tour for A Scout is Brave continues to its next stop, this time to the NecronomiCon conference in Providence, RI from Thursday, August 15 to Sunday, August 18.

I’ll be speaking or reading at two events:

  • Making it Strange: Literary Techniques for Writers, Saturday at 11am.
  • Reading, Sunday at 9:30am.

The rest of the time you can likely find me in the book room signing copies of my book at the Lethe Press table (where I may have some goodies to hand out) or wandering around Lovecraft’s old neighborhoods in Providence.

This is only the first Necronomicon I’m attending this year. The second is in Tampa from September 27 – 29.

Whew! Five Points Safe Again for Dads in Pink Polo Shirts and Assault Sandals!

My favorite theater in the world, Sun-Ray Cinema, has closed after their historic building in the Five Points area was bought out by developers.

I’m told that the theater owners are looking for a new location, but my personal instinct after losing a labor of love like the Sun-Ray would be to retreat somewhere to rest up and mourn the loss. Maybe they’ll come back somewhere else, but I wouldn’t blame them if they decided Jacksonville didn’t deserve it.

(I’m projecting here. Every time I’ve talked to the owners myself they’ve been cheerful, positive people.)

The Sun-Ray was the kind of quirky place that played artsy films alongside the first-run ones. I’ve seen most of the A24 oeuvre there, plus a wide range of oddness like the new mediocre Star Wars movies, What We Do in the Shadows, Fury Road, The Witch, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, A Simple Favor, Hail Satan?, Book Smart, JoJo Rabbit, The Hidden Fortress, and about six of their annual showings of Jaws. (Where the audience would crush a can of Narragansett beer when Quint did.)

Aimee and I attended the second-to-last showing of Jaws there.

Even if the movie wasn’t great, you at least could enjoy the food and alcohol they served on pock-marked wooden tables that stretched along the rows. An employee would skulk up from the darkness to leave your pizza or basket of knick-knack sticks, and I’d whisper “Thanks!” as they skittered away.

It’s sadder when they have the lights up.

They had festivals and special showings with people like John Waters. Over the summers, they’d play movies for kids that had an all-you-could-grab sugary cereal bar. They had great pre-movie announcements, including my favorite with weird puppets talking too loud on cell phones.

One of their pre-movie ads had Stan Lee telling you to keep your feet off the tables.

You had to be a little choosy about what kind of person you’d take to the Sun-Ray. It was dark and sticky and had a lot of layers of chipped paint. They had murals of movie monsters and a precarious balcony that they discouraged people from using. You could hear the movie from the bathrooms on either side of it. Sometimes it smelled weird.

Sometimes they’d let people sit or stand up there.

If you had a friend who wouldn’t get the Sun-Ray vibe, who insisted on corporate safety and blandness, that was a good reason to realize they weren’t your kind of person anyway.

During the Plague Year when they were closed and needed support, I rented the theater to show Lake Mungo to friends.

It was the kind of theater that you’d run when you were fourteen years old after breaking in.

Here I am with Steve and Aimee for the latest Indiana Jones film on my 50th birthday.

I’m not much a part of any community (being scared and skeptical of them), so I regret that I wasn’t part of the Sun-Ray’s a lot more. I went to movies there, loved the atmosphere, and then went off afterward in a very aloof Gen-X sort of way. I wish I’d introduced myself and told them how much I liked it, how welcome I felt even alone in the darkness, but I never felt cool enough.

My neighborhood is being taken over by investors with spreadsheets, people who think that enough data can guarantee that every dollar spent is a dollar quadrupled. They believe that everyone wants high ceilings and bright lights and wi-fi and checklist entertainment, a place to take a selfie to show how fun they are.

Maybe those developers are right.

What I loved about the Sun-Ray, though, was that it was a weird space: a place for enjoying the weird and personifying the weird and being surprised by the weird. It was a place for brief displacement and then…maybe wonder. Maybe disappointment. Who knew?

We’ve come to a terrifying moment when we think that the data we’re gathering about the past and present can guarantee the future. We believe we know exactly how many people we can fire without losing any business. We’ve “perfected” the science of entertainment, measuring out the beats of our blockbuster movies in coffee spoons, taking fewer chances, making fewer mistakes.

We’ve refined the process of going straight from investment to profit without any of the accidents that really pay off in between.

I know when I go to the AMC Theatre that a benevolent corporation will protect me from any experience that’s too upsetting or too transcendent. We all have to return to work on Monday, after all, and it wouldn’t do to be amazed too often.

I hope the Sun-Ray finds a new home. When it does, I’ll be there, ready again for a good weirdening.

Dedicating A Scout is Brave

If you’ve savored every page in your copy of A Scout is Brave, you may have noticed this dedication near the beginning:

For William Simmons, who was never to my knowledge a Boy Scout but who has exemplified every one of their stated ideals throughout our nearly forty-year friendship…though not perhaps in the ways they’d expect. I appreciate our late-night urban hikes and the honest perspectives you’ve always provided to me. I hereby award you the Iconoclastic Integrity merit badge.

And you may have asked yourself, “Who the fuck is William Simmons?”

[Spoiler alert for people accustomed to reading my too-frequent eulogies: William is alive and well.]

William Simmons at Necronomicon.
This is William Simmons.
(Photo by Dave Lally.)

I’ve been friends with William since 1987, when he came knocking on my door and asking for Norman Amemiya, who’d told him that Dungeons and Dragons was about to take place at my home.

I was relieved to see him, if I’m being honest: Norman, though mentally about fourteen, was a 32-year-old man and my mother was a bit worried that my new gaming group was full of people twenty years older than me. Luckily, William was only four years older.

Together with Norman and a rotating series of guest gamers, William and I met for weekly sessions of Car Wars, Star Frontiers, Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, Toon, Paranoia, Battletech, and (maybe once or twice) D&D. Like Norman, he was very tolerant of my ADHD-fueled, rules-indifferent gonzo gamemastering style.  

William Simmons playing Conan on an Apple II at Willcon.
William was especially found of Conan on the Apple II as well as Eamon.

We also gathered around my Apple II+ as I developed a starship bridge simulator and a food chain science project, not to mention playing a few hundred cracked and pirated games that would grind ominously in my failing disk drive.

Once while he was staying overnight at my house way out of town, our cat gave birth to a few sickly kittens and then fled outside into the darkness. The only light source we had handy was an antique kerosene lantern, which he held aloft amid the orange trees, looking for the cat like Diogenes searching for an honest man.

At most science fiction, fantasy, horror, or gaming conventions we’ve attended since 1987, we’ve taken a late-night walk around whatever downtown area was handy. We chat about books and movies and games, plus my deranged ambitions to write. Once while crossing a drawbridge in Fort Lauderdale, we had to run when it began to rise under our feet.

I’m not doing a good job conveying who William is beyond “erstwhile gaming buddy.”

Like me, William didn’t have the most peaceful childhood. My reaction to uncertainty was to grasp desperately for control of my world, but William’s was a calm and measured scientific detachment. He is the most open-minded person I’ve ever met, willing to understand strange ideas (and people) while weighing all the information he can get. When my first wife called him during our divorce to get him to take her side, he said, “I really don’t have enough information to do that.”

William playing Call of Cthulhu at Willcon.
William participating in the Call of Cthulhu scenario that A Scout is Brave was partly based on.

William exemplifies all of the Scout laws that Bud Castillo follows in A Scout is Brave, though he’s sorely tested in his convenience store job each day. William’s ambition these days seems mostly to be peace, which I wholeheartedly understand; he does his job, reads more books than anybody I know, and has walked every furlong of Lord of the Rings Online.

I have three degrees in English literature and writing, yet William is the only person I know who has read the entire works of Shakespeare. He has a habit of doing that, reading an author’s entire oeuvre. He’s a fan of life’s side quests.

Aubrey from A Scout is Brave is a combination of Norman’s alien perspective of the world and William’s calm and considerate one. That character (and that book) wouldn’t exist without them, and I wanted you all to know that.

Readercon Approaches on Little Cat Feet

My A Scout is Brave book tour continues, this time with a visit to Boston and Readercon at the Marriott Boston Quincy!

Here’s where you can find me:

  • Friday, July 12, 7pm: A Weird Reading Tonight (a group reading with other Lethe Press authors)
  • Saturday, July 13, 11am: Getting Your Other Foot in the Door (parlaying an early success into a longer one)
  • Saturday, July 13, 2pm: The Tyranny of the Tale (alternate forms of storytelling other than your “Save the Cat” bullshit)
  • Saturday, July 13, 7pm: Will Ludwigsen Reading
  • Lurking at the Lethe Press table in the Dealer’s Room at other random intervals

I hope to see you there, and also at other book tour stops in your neighborhood (assuming you live in New England or Florida):

  • NecronomiCon Providence, August 15-18, Providence RI
  • Necronomicon Tampa, September 27-29, Tampa FL
  • Mysterious surprise book tour stop TBA, October, Jacksonville FL

A Scout is Brave Bursts Forth from Beneath the Waves!

Today is the official launch date for my book A Scout is Brave, though some lucky souls pre-ordered it or bought copies at our fabulous book launch on Saturday.

People at the book launch for A Scout is Brave.
It’s like the scene at the end of Titanic when people welcome Rose back to the ship!
People attending the book launch for A Scout is Brave
It’s my favorite thing in the world when people from all corners of my life come together in one place: family, friends, coworkers, former students, and bitter creditors!
Will Ludwigsen reading from his book A Scout is Brave
Here I await thunderous applause while my publisher Steve Berman signals the audience.

Of course, it’s never too late to join the troop!

And don’t forget that talented musical artist Kathexis93 has released a Lovecraftian prequel album, available on Bandcamp.

Oh, Yeah: That Other Book

With all of the hullabaloo about A Scout is Brave (coming very, very soon!), it’s easy to forget that I have other books…including this one with a redesigned cover!

It has the same great content that lost me a Shirley Jackson Award in 2014, but if it’s been bugging you that the cover wasn’t as snazzy as the one for Acres of Perhaps…well, now they match a little better and you can complete your collection.

It’s available now in all the usual places.

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