Stories of Weird Mystery
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.
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.
(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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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?
I am indeed, so subscribe to the newsletter or visit here frequently for announced dates and locations!
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!
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:
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:
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.
I’m grateful all the time, believe it or not, for people and pets and inanimate objects. I once kissed an Amtrak train as a little kid to thank it for safely getting us home from Florida, and my mother had to yank me away before it decapitated me.
Many years later, I was driving somewhere with my (eventual ex-) wife, contemplating the universe in my quiet Scandinavian way, when a profound insight sparked across a few neurons.
“You know what I don’t appreciate enough?”
She looked over at me, eyes filled with hope.
“Nestle Nesquik. I’ve been drinking it since I was five years old across multiple states and economic conditions, and it’s always been a comfort to me.”
So Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, an excuse to eat and talk a lot with family and friends, but I don’t always articulate what specifically I’m thankful for because it’s always Thanksgiving in my heart. (Aw!)
Let’s do some articulatin’!
I’m grateful for you, supporting my intense desire to capture the world in words!
Ten years ago today, my father died in hospice from colon cancer, an event that was more stunning than sad…mostly because I assumed Satan had more work for him yet to do on the Earth.
I crack a lot of jokes about how awful he was, how his weird sociopathic tone deafness to human feeling made him no more conscious than a shark, how his leaving of my mother was like the fall of the Empire from Star Wars.
You might even say at this point that I’m really punching down…just like he did to me!
Hey-o!
I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I’ve squeezed a lot of humor and horror out of him over the years, or that I need to let it all go and move on, or that I’d have made even the best father into a villain if it made my stories or my life more interesting.
I wonder all of that, too.
Of our complicated relationship, I’ll just say this:
If you’re someone who takes pride in how your son inherited your gift for eloquent bullshittery, you’d better be nicer to him.
He’s the one who will write your epitaph.
It’s hard to believe that my home convention (as opposed to the convention I host in my home) of Necronomicon in Tampa is celebrating its 42nd event.
I started attending in 1987, skipped a few years in college, and then returned for good in 1996. I’ve always had a great time participating in panels, playing games, and catching up with old friends.
Though my schedule isn’t entirely confirmed, it looks like I’ll be doing at least two panels on Saturday morning:
You can find us from September 22nd through the 24th at the Embassy Suites near the University of South Florida.
Plus…the convention supports the Kids and Canines charity, so you’re likely to see at least one dog!
How can you pass that up?
I started writing to entertain my family and then my classmates by reading aloud. Then I wrote to continue stories with the action figures I loved. Then I wrote because I wanted to be funny like Erma Bombeck and Jean Sheppard and Patrick McManus.
I wrote because other people told me I was a writer and so I could say they were right. I wrote because I wanted to be famous. I wrote because I wanted to build an audience that would one day encourage me to run for office as a literary philosopher president.
I wrote as a way of turning my inherited talent for eloquent bullshittery to something less destructive than how my father applied it. I wrote to get revenge on him, to show I’d grown up okay despite all his efforts. I wrote to fight evil with words like Voltaire. I wrote to debug our Cambellian cultural software, evoking the epic in all of us.
I wrote to woo women. A lot. (A lot of writing, not a lot of women.)
I wrote to earn a comfortable sinecure in academia. I wrote to escape from terrible stultifying office jobs. I wrote hoping to be a free observer on the sidelines of life, above economy and mobs.
I wrote to make the world more mysterious and strange, to make readers laugh and cringe and laugh again. I wrote so I could live forever, perhaps through an oft-visited statue of me somewhere in Englewood or Gainesville or Jacksonville not far from a vault of my well-protected papers.
Then I wrote so other people could live forever, to remember and preserve them.
But I outgrew all of that, leaving it behind as egotism and deciding that such motivations were impure. I had (and still have) the very Generation X idea that if you want something too much, you won’t get it.
Why do I write now?
Because it seems to be the talent that I have, remembering things with more drama and detail than most people. Because I like noticing connections and contradictions between things. Because I still want to make the world more weird and interesting.
Because I do love the people in my life, alive and dead, good and less than good, and I want their lives to be seen as the treasures that they are.
I used to write to entertain and inspire people, but I’m less sure lately than many of them deserve it. Now I write as a signal to anyone who does, a clandestine gesture to other saboteurs in enemy country.
I write now because I like making things clearer and more interesting with words. I still like making people see and feel things. I like making ME see and feel things, surrounding something amorphous with words so I can get at least a hint of its size and shape.
I feel alive when I’m noticing and synthesizing, when the shiver of recognition comes that something sounds right.
I’m sick these days of characters, plots, scenes, arcs, point of view, and narrative distance. I’m sick of clanking scaffolds, of our perfected science of franchise content storytelling. I’m exhausted by the act of doing the right things to say I’m a writer, to have a career.
I really just want to “shoot the shit” as my mother and father used to say, and I’m starting to think that maybe I can.
Maybe that’s all I can.
I have recently relaunched my site Might As Well Write as a newsletter for cynical writers looking for practical hope!
Its tagline is “Darkly encouraging advice for creators who aren’t quite ready to give up,” and a logical question you might have is what I mean by “darkly encouraging.”
See, you can go to any number of places for delusional milquetoast advice about “following your dreams” and “sticking with it” and “applying butt to chair” and all of the usual cliches.
But if you’ve been creating for any amount of time in the 21st century, where “content” is literally piped down the street to every house and more people want to make it than to read it, you know that the usual platitudes just don’t cut it anymore.
Yeah, yeah, Grandma Moses got started painting at 78 years old. Let’s see her start a TikTok.
What if you had a friend who knew just enough about being a success AND a failure in our current creative “marketplace,” who’s sold some fiction and gotten a few nice notices but isn’t fooling himself? What if that friend was willing to answer your questions with total self-destructive honesty…but also ready to share the tiny but powerful flashes of hope that keep him going?
I can be that disconcerting but helpful friend!
Sure, a “successful” writer can tell you how they did it, and the answer is almost always to work hard and be lucky. I’m here to tell you how to work hard even when you’re unlucky, how to hold on and find the reasons your art exists for you.
(Until you do get lucky and can start the wealthy and decadent stage of your creative journey where you throw whiskey bottles at the people who used to love you.)
That’s what I mean by “darkly encouraging”: I’ll never lie to you that a creative life is easier than it is…and I won’t lie to you when sometimes it’s worth it.
Most of your online creative advisors will give you this:
I’m here to give you this:
If that’s something you’re into, please join us and subscribe to the newsletter! It’ll appear weekly in your email.
"This short novel manages to pack into its 150 pages Bradbury-esque whimsy and imagination, the melancholia of memoir, the spirit of weird pulp adventure, and the bite of contemporary angst and satire."
- Paul Tremblay
"Evocative tales of alternate realities steeped in the ethos of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury."
- Kirkus Reviews
"Exquisite craftsmanship makes this a timeless classic for those seeking asylum from formulaic prose."
- Publishers Weekly, starred review
© 2024 Will Ludwigsen
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