Category: Writing (Page 1 of 3)

I Won! I Won! (Not Exactly)

July 20, 2025 / Will Ludwigsen

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!

ICFA 2025: March 19 – 22, Orlando

February 23, 2025 / Will Ludwigsen

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!

I’m Big with the Presbyterians

January 26, 2025 / Will Ludwigsen

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 / Will Ludwigsen

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 / Will Ludwigsen

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.

Oh, Yeah: That Other Book

June 17, 2024 / Will Ludwigsen

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.

The Writer at Age Nine

March 31, 2024 / Will Ludwigsen

If you think my work is juvenile now, let me tell you…it was much worse when I was in the fourth grade. The year was 1982, and an obscure director named Steven Spielberg was all over my mother’s entertainment magazines posing with a rubber puppet.

At nine years old, I discovered the idea that someone got PAID to entertain people with made up stories, which is something I’d been doing all my life for free like a chump.

Will Ludwigsen around age nine. — Rocking the Garanimal outfit!

(It’s important to mention that due to some mutation of ADHD or anxiety or schizophrenia, my brain was constantly buzzing with all sorts of random shit like during the credits of The Twilight Zone. I was effectively insane, talking or performing almost constantly even when nobody was around. Stories all but shot out of my eyeballs.)

Steven Spielberg showed me that one boy’s mental illness was a grown man’s career, and I started writing stories down in my famously meticulous handwriting.

My first completed story was called “Cats!”, built upon my assumption that the stage musical was simply a bunch of skits about cats doing funny things around the house.

I showed this brilliant work to my fourth-grade teacher Mr. Clark who, perhaps to gain a moment of peace, allowed me to read it aloud to the class. Their reaction was like water on a grease fire, and I began producing other works for their entertainment.

Most of them were sequels to my favorite films and TV shows.

First page of terrible E.T. fan fiction.

You’ll notice perhaps that they are dialogue heavy with lots of exclamation points, mostly because – like the early primitive storytellers – they were meant to be performed. Some of them are just outlines of ideas that I’d improvise a story around when I was standing in front of the class.

What was their reaction? I remember mostly that they were relieved to be free of schoolwork and would occasionally offer up a few laughs at the funny parts.

Which was fine by me.

I tried my hand at comic book writing, too, though I had some weaknesses as an artist. Ultra-Dummy and the Legion of Stuffed Animals was the flagship production of a “company” started with my friend Garrett Albritton (hence the name W.A.G. for “Will and Garrett”).

Toward the end of my story-performing career in the seventh grade (when it was starting to get me teased instead of applauded), I wrote my first foray into 1963:

(Who’d have thought that 38 years later, my novella A Scout is Brave would also take place in 1963? Have you heard of it? It’s available for pre-order!)

My teacher Mrs. Kessel, who was mystified that I would only do extra credit reading and writing instead of the actual assigned curriculum, gave me an early blurb I could use on my books even now:

Your story was adorable! You are so funny…a future O. Henry or Steinbeck!

I wonder sometimes whether I’d have chosen writing as a vocation if I hadn’t been praised for it by teachers and family. If they’d loved my work with Lego, would I have been an engineer? Or if they told me I was brilliant at explaining things in a way idiots could understand, would I have gone into corporate training and communication?

I think writing is more fundamental to my personality than those other things for three reasons:

I get a thrill out of people’s reactions to it that I don’t get from anything else.
I also get a shiver of joy from capturing something exactly and specifically with language.
I’m willing to keep doing it even when it doesn’t turn out well.

These pencil scrawls on notebook paper are rather embarassing now; they show a lot more enthusiasm than ability. The only thing that came to me naturally about writing was doing it even when my brain was a scramble and I was bouncing off the walls

Maybe that’s the surest sign that you’ve found your life’s work: you keep doing it anyway.

A Stunted Imagination

February 19, 2024 / Will Ludwigsen

Sometimes I worry that I have a stunted imagination.

If you’ve read my work before, it’s likely that you’ve noticed that I have some themes that I return to over and over again:

Conspiracies of seemingly powerless but imaginative people thwarting evil and darkness
Nostalgia distilled to its metaphorical root
People who are wrong about the universe in interesting ways for interesting reasons
People who pursue their delusional theories off a cliff and suffer the consequences
Strange phenomena that turn out not to be random

A Scout is Brave (coming in July 2024!) has all five of those things, and as I read through it again a few weeks ago for a quick line edit, I wondered:

Am I imaginative enough for this business?

Though I often read and enjoy flamboyantly visionary mind-blowing fiction with wild ideas (Philip K. Dick, let’s say, or Ted Chiang), I seem to have a strange fuse in my mind that stops me from writing it. I’m not comfortable building castles in the air with nothing underneath them.

Will Ludwigsen with a copy of Missing! by Daniel Cohen — Like this book I recently found from my childhood.

Much of my early reading was what I jokingly refer to as “horror non-fiction,” things like ghosts and vampires putatively told as true. There was a participatory aspect to it for me, an idea that if I looked around the right corner fast enough, I’d see something wondrous.

I could imagine seeing Bigfoot in the woods, but not a dragon. That blows the fuse, unfortunately, which is why I’ll probably never write a heroic fantasy story.

And while I enjoy visionary writers like Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti and Arthur C. Clarke who really press the gas pedal on going to the frontiers of their stories, I just can’t write that way.

Dog with a doll's head, why do you ask? — An image I created after a dream.

I’m more of a weirdener.

I take normal things and make them plausibly weird because I hope to this day that I’ll come around a corner and see something wondrous. I’ll never ride aboard a starship or fend off an army of orcs at Helm’s Deep, but man, I will find my way into a secluded place in the woods or an abandoned mental institution.

You need a story about a house creeping slowly across the landscape? I’m your guy. You want to read about a television show that’s production was as strange as its content? I got you covered. You curious about what the Zodiac killer thought of the Moon landing? I’m on it.

David Lynch isn’t asking me to write a fourth season or feature film of Twin Peaks, but if he did, a question I’d have to answer for myself would be whether the whole world was “Twin Peaks-y” or if it only happened in odd Lynchian pockets. I’d prefer the latter because we’d all have known by now if we were living in a 100% Lynchian world, but if we could come upon that strangeness in certain places and times, it would give us a lot more hope that we could still be surprised by reality.

I think that’s how my stories, including A Scout is Brave, work. They’re all about the 10% chance that they aren’t completely untrue, a combination of cultivating our garden and fertilizing it with the strange.

You know, weirdening.

Behold! A Scout is Brave!

January 7, 2024 / Will Ludwigsen

It’s been a long time coming (as mentors and fellow students of the Stonecoast MFA program can attest, among others), but my novella A Scout is Brave is finally emerging from the twisted gray woods of the Massachusetts coast in July of 2024!

That gorgeous cover is the work of Jeremy Parker who went to extraordinary lengths to encapsulate the 1960s Scouting milieu in the design. My publisher Lethe Press pulled out all the stops.

What’s it about? Boy Scouts in 1963 Innsmouth, the dreaded town of fallen cultists invented (or is it discovered?) by H.P. Lovecraft.

I’m guessing you have questions.

A Lovecraft pastiche? Do we need that?

Maybe not, but some readers COULD need a coming-of-age story that explores some of the social consequences of Lovecraft’s original story.

If you’re a fan of Stephen King’s “The Body” or Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, I think you’ll like this story, too.

Is it scary?

It’s as scary as the rest of my work, meaning that it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of thing: not overtly terrifying but with implications that sneak up on you.

It may not keep you up at night, but it’ll pop into your head in the middle of the day and make you mutter, “Wait. What the hell?”

Is that you on the cover?

No, that’s a representation of the book’s protagonist, Bud Castillo. Most pictures of me in the Scouts include me squinting at the sun or lugging a backpack larger than I am.

Are you aware that the Boy Scouts [insert wince-worthy practice here]?

Author Will Ludwigsen standing in his Boy Scout uniform like a big ol' geek. — Portrait of the author as a Scout taking it way too seriously.

Yeah. I read the 1963 Boy Scout Handbook as a kid and had very strange expectations when I joined my local troop in 1984. There was a lot more burning random shit in the woods and a lot less enjoying the sublime mysteries of nature than I expected.

I achieved the rank of Life Scout (just below Eagle), and this story comments on why that was enough for me.

What little I’ve followed of their political direction since then doesn’t inspire me much. Can we just get back to helping old ladies across the street?

Are you going on some sort of tour to promote the book?

I am indeed, so subscribe to the newsletter or visit here frequently for announced dates and locations!

Where can I get a copy?

I’m glad you asked! The book is available for pre-order through Lethe Press, and pre-orders are very important to the success of books. Please support me, this book, and Lethe Press by joining our Scout troop today!

Our A.I. Future: Acres and Acres of Porpipe

January 4, 2024 / Will Ludwigsen

My story “Acres of Perhaps” has been summarized by the site WritingAtlas.com, and I feel better than ever about A.I.’s potential to replace me as an artist.

Behold this glorious robot-generated cover:

Hideous and inaccurate A.I.-generated cover for my story Acres of Perhaps.

I’m not sure what a Porpipe is, but apparently there’s acres of it in my story.

That cover is a perfect symbol of the utter creative failure of “artificial intelligence.” The garbled text (“A the Fantay Comical Telvioin Optionitory Prorellsate”) and random images (Is that a toaster with a CB radio microphone clip on the top?) show exactly what it’s good at: filling space with a simulacrum of content without caring about its meaning.

We are finally on the cusp of replacing the freshman composition student, a dream all teachers have had since the age of Socrates.

If you want six hundred words or 700×700 pixels or four minutes of anything, literally anything, to earn money from curious but ultimately disappointed clicks, we now have the technology to complete the ouroboros. We can now game our own system by using algorithms to trick other algorithms into a crass imitation of value.

And I’m not even mad about it! I’m vaguely proud that my work is hard for a computer to understand.

A writer for the ’60s most famed and experimental television series watches the shows phantasmic creator choose between recluse genius and a quaint life of normalcy. Faced with stubborn alcoholism, a hit television series resemblant of the twilight zone, and a tree stump with questionably magical properties, the narrator watches cinematic wunderkind David Findley toe the line between brilliance and delusion.
A.I. apparently cloned from a High School Freshman at Writingatlas.com

In fact, I propose that we refer to spam-like slabs of meaningless imagery and text as “porpipe,” as in:

“Did you see that tub of porpipe they tried to sell off as a new recording artist?”
“What we need for this side of our fraudulent website is just a column of pure, Grade D porpipe. I don’t care where you get it or what it’s made from.”
“Excuse me, professor, but the syllabus doesn’t say what percentage of our papers have to be porpipe.”
“Take the porpipe. Leave the cannoli.”

If you produce creative work that’s better than porpipe, that taps into something unique and interesting and human and fucked up, the good news is that you needn’t worry about porpipe replacing you yet.

The bad news? It may not be long until most people can’t tell the difference.