Category: Writing (Page 1 of 3)

Algernon Blackwood is My Scoutmaster

October 28, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

The 1963 Boy Scout Handbook that my father gave me at age nine led me to believe that I would venture into the woods with like-minded seekers to stand awestruck beneath towering redwoods¹ and then we’d carry that humility back to lives of service to humanity.²

When I joined the Scouts a few years later, I seemed to be the only one hoping for a sublime experience in the woods. Everyone else was there mostly to burn things and flirt with fascism, including my father who was the Assistant Scoutmaster.

What I didn’t know then was that my true Scoutmaster had died twenty-two years before I was born: British writer, outdoorsman, dairy farmer, Theosophist, occultist, radio broadcaster, and perceptive oddball Algernon Blackwood.

Algernon Blackwood, wearing his most ominous bowtie.

Blackwood (1869 – 1951) wrote and performed ghost stories often set in the wilderness where his “lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists”³ encountered escalating signs that they were not alone (or often welcome) amongst the ageless sentinels of nature.

Ghost story scholar Jack Sullivan called him a “combination of mystic and outdoorsman,” which strikes me as a far better Scoutmaster for a campfire than some middle-aged guy spouting off from a lawn chair about how the Russians are going to invade.

I mean, how’s this for a Scout Law?

My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty.

Is that too much to ask from a camping trip, that I experience the subtle vibrations of the universe in my bones, hints of some deep and ancient intelligence of which I am but a fleeting expression?

Spoiler alert: yes.

My Scout career had plenty of weirdness⁴, but all too little of the numinous, which wasn’t for lack of searching. I was prone to wandering away from campsites looking for burial mounds or a pirate’s cabin, neither of which seemed implausible in feral Florida.

The closest I came (and it wasn’t very close) was during one of my three summers at Camp Flying Eagle. For a week, we took “classes” for merit badges, slept in old military tents or rotting cabins that were worse, ate from dented aluminum utensils in a big mess hall, and tromped around on trails through the scrabble pines and primordial palmetto bushes. I didn’t really mind any of that because obviously there could be something wondrous and strange around any corner.

This is from a recent visit but the vibe is the same. The water level was higher when I was a kid, though.

Your author, hanging out at the Marie Selby cabins. Notice he’s got a book.

My favorite part of the camp was near the area called Marie Selby (named for a Sarasota philanthropist), situated amid the taller and shadier oaks at what was then a far edge of the property. I’d strike out from the cabins and wander through the cypress swamp, a marshy patch of knobby tree roots (“knees”) jutting from the muck.

I remember being mildly nervous each time I went out. In Florida, it’s common to see alligators lurking in any sizeable body of water, and venomous cottonmouths could easily be slithering camouflaged by the ooze. I saw no need to startle them, so I walked as the handbook suggested by stepping on my heel first and then letting my foot roll forward silently to the toe

Once when I ventured farther than usual from camp, I came upon a path of springy wooden planks built across the stumps and cypress knees. I followed them carefully through the swamp for a surprisingly long way as the cicadas droned around me from all directions, sometimes surging as though they were closing in.

I zigged and zagged my way to the terminus of the path, an enormous oak or cypress stump about the size of a Volkswagen and covered in lichen and moss. It reminded me of Yoda’s house on Dagobah, and of course, I circled it looking for an obvious entrance.

There wasn’t one, at least not that presented itself to me.

What struck me as I stood there looking around was that this was not an obvious destination. There was no place to sit (nor much of one to stand), and there wasn’t any placard identifying some natural object like elsewhere in camp. Someone had dragged salvaged lumber out into the swamp, strategically placed them on the most stable spots, and then stopped at a giant stump⁵.

It wasn’t a noise that jolted me into action or anything I could see, just a sudden Blackwood-ian realization that I was standing in a spot where normal logic didn’t apply. Someone built this for hidden reasons, and I assumed they couldn’t be good.⁶

In a surprising display of balance, I hurried back across the boards with some of them cracking beneath me—not quite a run but certainly not a stroll. Did the cicadas stop their chatter to watch me go? I don’t remember, but it would have been the least they could do.

That’s it. That was essentially my only remotely sublime Boy Scouting experience. It would have been nice to consult with Scoutmaster Blackwood that night around the campfire, comparing notes of our psychic impressions, but we probably just went to the mess hall to eat watery spaghetti.

Here I am waiting in line at that mess hall.

I never found a body in the woods or discovered mysterious coquina megaliths, but I’ve had a few experiences of awe and wonder since. When I haven’t, I’ve filled the gap the same way Algernon Blackwood did, by writing stories. I haven’t come close to his masterpieces of natural horror “The Willows” or “The Wendigo,” but I did create a troop of Wonder Scouts led by Charles Fort (“We Were Wonder Scouts”) and wrote a couple of books about a troop in Innsmouth.

As a small gift to you for this Halloween season, I’ve read a portion of Blackwood’s famous story “The Willows.” Download it and play it while getting ready for trick-or-treaters or stoking some embers in your backyard firepit.

Not available in Florida. Your mileage may vary. ↩︎
In my defense for this deranged impression, the text and illustrations in the handbook (not to mention the Norman Rockwell cover) somewhat oversold the link between Nature and…human nature. ↩︎
Jack Sullivan’s wonderful phrase. ↩︎
Pulling a kid from a creek full of thrashing gar, for instance, or falling down a mound of fill dirt to get a concussion on a rock. ↩︎
Later to appear in my story “Acres of Perhaps.” ↩︎
The most logical reason, that it was built by a weirdo like me, didn’t register. I was the kind of kid who still looked in the woods for evidence of gnomes and Bigfoot. ↩︎

We All Squeal for Sequels, Unfortunately

October 22, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

We’ve been keeping this under wraps, but did you know that my new novel, A Scout is Loyal, is emerging from the Mekong Delta in just a few weeks? To pique your interest in the meantime, I’ll be posting here and elsewhere with some thoughts about how the book came about, along with a few other surprises along the way.

Ugh, sequels. As a human programmed by evolution to seek trusted members of my tribe, I hate how easy it is to send a chill up my spine with a familiar character.

When I saw this in the theater with my mother, she elbowed a stranger and told them she’d taken me to see the original in 1977.

My cynical theory is that sequels are what we have now instead of physical communities: a set of continuing situations and people we can all discuss in common to forge bonds between us. Because we can’t keep talking about a fifty-year-old movie, we need new encounters with those characters to have more reason to talk about our values.

It’s an easy button to push, having an old friend show up on the page or screen. I actually got choked up when Dale Cooper appeared in the third season of Twin Peaks.

I even took a picture of it, amazed to be seeing him again.

I have only a few gold standard sequels: The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Wrath of Khan, and The Search for Spock. Among books, The Lord of the Rings¹, Finders Keepers, and Silence of the Lambs come to mind…but not many others. As a viewer and a reader, I enjoy the idea of an experience being special and strange, and if I want to feel it again, there’s always the original.²

What turns me off in most sequels is self-awareness, an aura of portentousness when the writers and producers develop a sense of the work as a shared cultural artifact. It invites either hubris (“Fuck you, we’re Game of Thrones“) or pandering (“Someone get me the ghost of Harold Ramis!”), and in both cases, it means you’re paying more attention to meeting an expectation than exceeding one.³

The kind of art I like most appears in the world blinking in surprise that it exists at all. The odds were long, the end uncertain, and the effort dangerously close to futile, but it became real through heroic effort that nobody asked for. In that desperate risk, there is energy and passion to make something succeed that is much more rare when you know an automatic audience is waiting.⁴

You dress up a little nervously for the first date, and if you’re smart, you don’t show up for the second in Crocs and cargo shorts saying, “What? Aren’t we married?” Instead, you approach the second date (or second book) as another angle of introduction, a deepening of a theme.

In all candor, I barely managed to write A Scout is Brave⁵, and I never expected anyone to want a sequel…especially me. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions it received and more so by the interest from some readers to find out what happened next to Bud Castillo.

The more I thought about it, the more curious I was about Bud’s next adventure, too. Once you’ve thwarted Deep Ones in Innsmouth, what’s next?

Vietnam, it turns out.

A quirk of my writing process is that I rarely remember the writing process. I know intellectually that it involves a lot of typing and handwriting and talking to myself on the page and jamming puzzle pieces together, but after it becomes a finished thing, the story feels inevitable. I call it the “shiver of recognition” that comes at the end, as though it always existed.

So when I began writing ASL on July 18, 2024, I approached it like another first book instead of a sequel. For one thing, it may well be someone’s first exposure to the “franchise,” and for another, I was just as nervous about making a good impression. I didn’t take your good will for granted.

The book that resulted feels like it has second date energy: we felt some sparks during our first meeting but now it’s time to see where else we can go.

Care to join me?

A sequel to The Hobbit, of course. ↩︎
I re-read a lot of books, largely as medicine to feel a certain way at a certain time. Sometimes, I’m not up for the risk of a new feeling. ↩︎
Don’t get me started on the whole “confounding fan expectations” bullshit. ↩︎
Which isn’t to say that all art should be grueling or stressful to create. What I’m talking about here is a sense of experimentation. ↩︎
Which took over a decade of hacking away, plus another year and a half of sitting in a famous publisher’s slush pile before it found its true home with Lethe. ↩︎

A Scout is Loyal coming in fast!

September 28, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

Brave members of the troop, we’re happy to announce that we have a cover for my upcoming release, A Scout is Loyal:

Cover by the talented Jeremy John Parker.

In 1963, thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo and his friend Aubrey Marsh thwarted a conspiracy to unleash ancient horrors from beneath Devil’s Reef in Innsmouth, Massachusetts.

Six years later, still mourning Aubrey’s sacrifice, he finds that serving in Vietnam aboard a Swift Boat feels uncomfortably familiar: a battle of deranged true believers trying to get their hands on something ancient and hungry. This time, Bud will need more than a Scout’s sense of duty to survive it…especially when a ghost from Innsmouth challenges his loyalties.

“Intense… The unusual blend of war story and Lovecraftian horror leads to a shocking finale… a horror story that gets to a deeper truth.”
—Publishers Weekly

Yes, I’ll take questions at this time.

What do YOU know about the Vietnam War?

Just what my middle-aged white guy research has told me, which still puts me ahead of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara!

What if I haven’t read the first book?

This would be a wonderful opportunity to do so, as the book is still available in a variety of formats. That said, if you insist on not reading it, the story in A Scout is Loyal can stand on its own, though you’ll miss some significant emotional impact.

Is this book violent or scary?

Well, I mean, it takes place during the Vietnam War, but I haven’t gone out of my way to imbue that conflict with additional horror just for a genre audience. There’s eeriness and unease and the occasional burst of confusing violence, just like the real war.

Is this book ‘woke’?

In it, I take the controversial position that we had no idea what the fuck we were doing in Vietnam and that our idealistic American confidence did us no favors. We acted on the world as we wanted it to be, not how it was.

Are you writing books for all twelve tenets of the Scout Law?

Jesus, I hope not. There’s a third one in progress and a small but vocal group agitating for more after that, but I can’t imagine getting to all twelve. Who wants to read A Scout is Courteous or A Scout is Thrifty?

I’m a reviewer, blogger, or podcaster interested in reviewing this book. Where can I get an advance copy?

Reach out to my contact form and I’ll be happy to get you one! It’ll be a relief to receive something other than an AI-generated pitch from a book promoter.

When and where can I get my Deep One claws on this book?

I thought you’d never ask. The book will surge from the misted jungles of the Mekong Delta in mid November, but keep watch for announcements of the official launch and some other surprises.

If you’d like to join up now with a preorder, click below!

Story: The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs

March 10, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

[Appeared originally in the January/February 2026 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.]

Have you ever gazed up into the infinite cosmos at night with your family and observed a light in the sky moving in a way it shouldn’t?

Maybe the light stopped suddenly and then started again. Maybe it skittered across your field of vision like a bug across a forest pond. Or maybe it wobbled and danced as though you were its only audience.

Your mom or her boyfriend may have told you it was a weather balloon or a military aircraft, or perhaps they called it a “trick of the light.”

What if I told you that sometimes, perhaps even often, your mom and her boyfriend are wrong?

When you see something in the sky your parents can’t explain, scientists call that an Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO. You may have seen stories in magazines or on TV about them these days because they are becoming more and more frequent as we prepare to enter the 1980s.

Partly this is due to improved technology in optics, making good cameras cheaper for the common citizen. Some of it is because “aliens” are popular right now in the movie houses. A lot of it is just because more people than ever are looking up!

People like you.

You probably found this book on a special shelf in the school library with others like it about ghosts and missing people and Bigfoot. That’s 001.9 in the Dewey Decimal system, and it’s a magical place where curious and open-minded young people learn about things the grownups don’t want them to know.

Are you ready to learn more about UFOs? They’re nothing to be scared of, and with a little tenacity they can become IFOs: Identified Flying Objects. That makes them no less special…perhaps even more, because once we know the truth, we can take our first steps into our destiny among the stars.

What Can a Kid Like Me Do About UFOs?

When you think about how important UFO contact could be to the future of humanity, you may wonder if it would be better left to adults. They are, after all, smarter and stronger and more practical than kids.

But is that true? Think about who is usually saying so: adults. And while they have jobs and cars and big heavy books of laws, isn’t it at least possible that a kid is a better representative precisely because they don’t have those things?

A kid like you, for instance.

Adults don’t build forts in the woods. Nor do they make helmets from the bottoms of plastic soda bottles so their stuffed animals will be safe from falling Skylab debris. Nor do they make their own comic books or mix every flavor at the soda dispenser to see if one of the mixtures will explode.

In other words, they’re effectively dead and too boring for aliens to travel thousands of light years to visit.

What Could UFOs Be?

UFOs are not a new phenomenon. Humans have been observing strange lights and movement in the sky for millennia.

In 218 B.C., Livy reported “phantom ships…gleaming in the sky.” Isaiah 13:5 mentions beings that “come from a far country, from the end of heaven.” Japanese Samurai saw a wheel of fire near Nijo Castle in 1606.

Some suggest even the creatures of folklore, such as fairies, could be visitors from beyond the Earth possessing extraordinary powers and a curious interest in the development of humans.

We describe things with the tools we have. What you call a “flying saucer” was a “wagon wheel in the heavens” to an ancestor of the last century, or a “halo of flame” to one further back than that.

There have always been people of the lights, those who ride them and those who see them.

You may have noticed by now that adults find it difficult to hold a mystery in their heads without explaining it. When they don’t know enough to make a theory, they build an answer from their own fears.

To young folk like you, though, the whole world is wondrous and it isn’t scary to let an experience sort of float unattached to anything in your brain. Seeing a light wavering in the sky isn’t much different than seeing an armadillo trundling across a highway: it happened and it’s obvious and there’s no web of wrongness inside you for that fact to get stuck in.

The difference is that you want mysteries and grown-ups don’t.

That’s why when you tell a grown-up about seeing a light in the sky or a glowing person in the woods, they’re quick to give you a theory.

The most common, of course, is that it’s all your imagination. To them, your mind is an unformed jelly that can’t tell dream from reality. What if there isn’t a difference? What if one is just a reflection of the other? A dream doesn’t come from nowhere, after all—it’s built from your memories and sensations from the so-called real world.

So when you think about it, even if you are “only imagining” a UFO, you’re actually seeing or feeling something your brain is choosing to weave together from real life experience.

In other words, the UFO in your mind may be a delayed echo of one you really saw. Perhaps you were asleep when it happened. Or maybe you saw something from the corner of your eye that your brain decided to identify later.

Adults have long forsaken the logic of the dream, so they’re going to tell you UFOs are just weather balloons, swamp gas, experimental aircraft, meteorites, reflections of lights in the clouds, imperfections in the glass of a window or lens, or satellites.

They are skeptics, and what makes a skeptic feel smart is to think of the least interesting explanation for what they say and stick to that at all costs.

What Do I Need to Go Looking for UFOs?

Luckily, you can search for UFOs with the equipment you’ve evolved after uncounted millennia: the roving light buckets in your face that people call “eyes.” As a young person, you are likely blessed with unadulterated vision, free of cataracts or glaucoma or myopia, but even if you aren’t, your willingness to even look is still your most useful tool.

There are ways to improve your experience by assembling a simple kit containing these suggested items:

Binoculars, which are superior to a telescope because they have a wider angle of vision and don’t look suspicious when you carry them around your neck
A notebook or binder where you can write down your observations
Sunglasses to protect your eyes from the local star, the Sun, as well as from the dazzling lights on most UFOs
A light windbreaker or poncho for inclement weather
A compass to locate yourself and the UFO in relation to Earth’s magnetic pole
A camera, if you can afford or borrow one, to record what you see…though be warned that UFOs require an imaginative intelligence that film cannot often capture
Resealable plastic bags to gather samples (burned grass, wilted foliage, mysterious jellies)
A Thermos of water or Kool-Aid
A candy bar for energy
A backpack to contain your UFO spotting kit

You do not need a weapon of any kind, not a pocketknife and certainly not a firearm. UFOs are not hostile, but even if they were, your tools would be useless against them.

Again, we hasten to repeat that, aside from convenience, you need no tools but the ones in your head.

Where Do I Look for UFOs?

First, everywhere. Then up.

That’s a little joke that, like most, contains the truth. People across the world have reported UFOs at every time of the day and every point on the planet, so it isn’t necessary to wait until darkness or visit a specific place to see them.

What is necessary is to be the kind of person extraterrestrials would want to talk to, curious, excitable, open, and strange. It means knowing a lot of peculiar and interesting facts about your world. It means having theories about the mysteries of the universe, like what happened to Amelia Earhart and what’s going on in the Bermuda Triangle.

If you know people like your parents who have never seen a UFO, the most likely reason is they care too much about money and respectability to be caught looking up.

That can never be you.

What Should I Do If I See a UFO?

Can you believe there was a time when human beings didn’t write things down? It’s true. They remembered as much as they could about the world around them (which wasn’t much), and then they made up stories and rhymes to transmit those experiences to other people.

What this meant was most people didn’t know what was weird and what was ordinary. If you’ve only seen a cat once in your life, it can seem like a wondrous being.

Writing things down and gathering them together is called “data collection,” and it helps us understand and predict how the world works. Your not-so-distant ancestors saw lights in the sky just like you do, but after pointing them out to their tribe, they returned to gnawing on bones or hoeing.

In a way, that’s like killing a UFO. It diminishes the knowledge of our whole species.

What the smartest observers do is document their experiences. They do it as consistently as possible so they can compare one experience to the other to find patterns.

When you see a UFO, you can follow this simple procedure to do the right thing:

Note the time.
Continue watching the phenomena as long as you can. If necessary, move to the side of the road away from traffic. There is no reason to flee; it is unlikely that brilliant interstellar creatures would travel so far to harm you.
As soon after the event as possible, complete a copy of the Encounter Form included at the end of this book.

If you don’t have the form with you (which you should at all times), make note of these facts on a sheet of paper:

Names of all witnesses, including yourself
Time of day
Your position on the Earth in latitude and longitude
Your current speed, if any
Brief summary of light and weather conditions
Detailed description of the object, including shape and color
Your best estimate in degrees of its position above the horizon
Description or diagram of its movement
Description of any sounds it produced
Length in minutes of your encounter
Description of any visible beings and their behavior
Description and location of any physical evidence of the experience (such as scorch marks on the ground)
Inventory of anything you ate or drank within four hours of the event
Summary of your emotional state before, during, and after the sighting
Description of any long-term effects of the encounter (fatigue, sunburn, tinnitus, ennui)

The more of these you note for each encounter, the easier it will be to correlate the results to find patterns. Are the UFOs in your area particularly loud? Do they appear at a certain time of day? Do they make you feel the same way each time or is it different?

We suggest you buy a three-ring binder for your observation forms so you can keep them all in one place. If you live among people who are religious or otherwise untrustworthy, you may also do well to hide this binder.

Are UFOs Dangerous?

There are no documented cases of children being eaten by aliens, being turned into monsters, or being taken away unless they wanted to be.

There’s no technical reason an advanced civilization couldn’t do those things, but it seems a long and circuitous way to find prey, doesn’t it? Certainly there are more delicious or monstrous beings closer to home.

UFOs are only dangerous to terrible people.

Do UFOs Prefer Kids Who Are Good in School?

Smart kids who like things like UFOs and ghosts can sometimes have a hard time at school, not only from the little cretins in their classes but also teachers with minds as dead as bricks. To someone with a spirit of adventure, division facts and the notable exports of Belize are no substitute for real knowledge.

Youngsters like you who carry around UFO Reporting Forms in their pockets may also have problems at home which you express in ways your school doesn’t like. If your mom’s new boyfriend yells at you a lot, that yelling has to go somewhere…and it’s no good to keep it inside. Sometimes it makes your foot stick out in P.E. class to trip the boy who always wins.

See? You’re not so alone.

Advanced extraterrestrials care not for human academics because most of them are wrong. What is the use of being the most wrong of everyone else?

Who Should I Tell If I See a UFO?

You know by now that telling your mom or her boyfriend at the wrong time is a good way to get shushed or, in his case, smacked. Neither are responses you deserve, but adults are too busy digging their own graves to understand your profound experiences.

Likewise, reporting UFOs too frequently to your teacher or principal can lead to uncomfortable discussions with the guidance counselor about “acting out” or “seeking attention.” For most institutions designed to make people grow up, the capacity for wonder is a symptom, not a sign of beauty.

The police and FBI may be even worse because there are deep tracks in their brains carved by the terrible things they’ve seen, and to them, everything is suspicious or dangerous. Their allegiance is to the powerful, which is why they were nowhere to be found when those boys on the dirt bikes ran you off the road into the pond.

The unfortunate truth is there is no one to tell except perhaps another perceptive young person like yourself. There are more of you than you think, but you must be careful when seeking them, much like spies in an enemy country.

What should you look for? Kids who talk to their stuffed animals or action figures. Kids who stand on the edges of kickball writing in little notebooks. Kids who make whooshing noises on their bikes. Kids who draw even after grownups tell them they shouldn’t.

You are the aliens, and kind knows kind.

Are There Kids on UFOs?

Of course there are, some even from your own planet.

It wouldn’t be accurate to suggest UFOs are crewed by children, but they are certainly crewed by creatures with the hearts of children. No adult committed to the status quo ever built a craft capable of exceeding the speed of light for the specific purpose not to make money or conquer a foe but to find friends.

UFOs are built for the same reason you constructed that raft of plywood and Styrofoam to cross the retention pond: because there might be something—or someone—cool on the other side.

How Do I Prepare for a First Contact?

We can’t deceive you. A vanishingly small percentage of UFO sightings result in encounters with their occupants.

That percentage is not zero.

UFO sightings tend to escalate from the visual (lights in the sky) to the physical (scorch marks in the woods) to the personal (direct contact). Your best chance is to stay in the game long enough for that to happen, much like a fisherman who doesn’t expect every day to be a bounty.

Staying in the game means preserving yourself for the greatest moment in your life. It means playing along by brushing your teeth and going to bed on time. It means doing as much of your homework as you can stomach instead of stuffing it way to the bottom of your backpack. It means sometimes being what they call “good,” even though you don’t agree on the definition.

Above all else, it means preserving the tiny surging pulsar at the center of your body from the forces that want it to go cold and dark. That isn’t easy, and there will be times when you are sad and times when you are scared, crouching under the bathroom sink while the adults rage at one another. There may even be times when you are physically damaged.

During those times, you must keep your eyes to the sky and off the horrible things happening to you on the Earth. Being the kind of person to whom UFOs appear requires seeing Beyond What is Now, no matter how hard they make it.

The best way you can prepare for first contact is to fight your battles where they matter, inside where no one can truly reach you.

Also, it is a good idea to assemble a kit in case a First Contact turns into an evacuation:

Your favorite book
Your favorite toy or playset
A representative portfolio of your creative work: drawings, stories, pipe cleaner sculptures
A change of clothes
Comfortable shoes
Samples of your favorite foods for replication

A good contactee is a prepared contactee.

What Will Happen During My First Contact?

As your encounters escalate, you will begin to feel a strange quivering in your heart. This is the sensation of your body preparing to leave its life behind, and it is the surest sign your First Contact is coming soon.

You may be tempted to announce this to your mom or her boyfriend or maybe even a trustworthy adult, but we advise against it. For one thing, grownups are alarmed when their children grow beyond them. For another, they can place serious physical obstacles (including hospitalization) between you and your rightful place in the stars.

You may also want them to know why you prefer to meet strangers from dizzying light years away than eat another dinner of baloney and ketchup sandwiches with them. You may have grievances to air, injuries to avenge, explanations to demand. You may want righteous vengeance, if only the brief emotional sting that you know who and what they really are.

Your revenge, the revenge of all evolved beings, is to leave the others behind to grow in their own way as you grow in yours. That’s what being evolved means: understanding not everyone is on the same path in the same way.

When you are ready to let go, your people will come for you.

Have you ever wondered why no other child you’ve ever met has heard of this book? Or why it isn’t for sale at Waldenbooks in the mall? Or why it was on your favorite shelf in the library in the first place?

The reason is this is your book. It’s for you exactly and specifically, a young person we’ve been watching for all your life, whose experiences we’ve nudged to make you a superior form of humanity. A more interesting form.

We do this across time and space because the universal constant we’ve discovered is that pain is infectious, and hurt sentient beings—ones with skin, ones with fur, ones with fins–pass their hurt on to others. Your mother was hurt by the loss of your dad, and her boyfriend was hurt by his uncle, and like tea kettles, the steam must go somewhere.

Some special people have the capacity to spare others their steam, and those are the ones we seek. They tend to be imaginative but sad, curious but reluctant. Their injuries make them natural reconcilers of hope and reality, what has been and what can be, which makes them perfect for meeting their neighbors among the stars.

Kind knows kind, and we’re on our way.

Did You Know People Actually Asked Me to Speak at a Graduation?

January 15, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

I happened to notice that today is the fifteenth anniversary of my graduation with an MFA in Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. I wrote the first version of A Scout is Brave for my thesis–which an agent would later ask incredulously if I passed–and met a lot of wonderful people with whom I suck at keeping in touch.

I was lucky enough to be asked by my fellow graduates to speak at the graduation ceremony to the assembled crowd of relatives wondering what this all was for. Since I was part of the “popular fiction” program, I decided to defend the notion of escapism.

This is the speech I delivered. Some of it feels a little overwrought now, but I still largely agree with the sentiment. If we’re doomed to wallow in bullshit, I far prefer the imaginative and aspirational kind.

You know, there are days when I seriously doubt my writing will ever be as good as it was when I was seven, chasing the dog around my yard with the Millenium Falcon yelling “pyew! pyew! pyew!” I lived so much in stories then — talking to stuffed animals, looking for hobbits in the woods — that I was barely distinguishable from schizophrenic.

Don’t worry – I’m better now. Thanks for asking.

I suspect — I hope — that’s how it was for many of us graduating this evening, and I’m sure there are people out there in the audience who shudder to remember the symptoms of our madness: all those plays, skits, puppet shows, poetry readings, magic performances, comedy routines, concerts, and oh-so-many long-winded stories.

Don’t forget to thank them tonight. Or, you know, apologize.

Whatever forms it took then and takes now, we’re all crazy. We hear voices just like any hobo yelling at a mailbox – the only difference is that we know you don’t start a scene with dialogue. Most of us have lost any hope of pleasant neighborhood barbecues because we talk too much about the seas of Titan or the Manson family or the birthing habits of dragons…or all at the same time. People worry about us, and I think that’s a sure sign we’re doing something right.

I came to Stonecoast, perhaps like you, to learn how to be intelligently and usefully crazy. For two years, our wonderful mentors have shown us how to hold madness in asbestos gloves just long enough to get it on the page. We’ve studied the masters. We’ve critiqued the work of our peers. We’ve filled our mental toolboxes with structure and meter and point of view. We’ve discovered that the best writing is risky and dangerous.

We’ve learned, in other words, how to do it “right.” And, God, how I needed that.

But the worst thing that could happen after Stonecoast, I think, is for us to let all the intelligence and usefulness we’ve learned to overcome the crazy. It would be terrible to lose all we’ve learned by trying to hold it too consciously, failing to trust that the voices of our teachers and our friends will come again when we need them.

Because that madness we share, that reckless abandon, is really our only hope of making something wondrous. It’s the fuel by which we get out of our minds — risking our comfort, giving ourselves away, revealing the feelings that most people don’t. All that’s left is to decide whether we’ll get enough out of our minds to escape the gravity of ordinary life, and whether we’ll achieve enough lift to take others with us.

It’s easy to call what we do escapism, and I certainly don’t deny it. Stories of ghosts and spaceships helped me escape a harrowing youth to be sure, and I see all too many things worth escaping as an adult, too. I don’t think escapism is a bad thing, especially when we’re escaping the tedious patterns of existence, the prejudices that confine us, the fears that estrange us from ourselves.

Either people can be as noble and adventuresome and intelligent as they are in our fantasy stories, or they can’t. If they can, then our “escapist” fictions are the experimental conscience of our culture. If they can’t, then our “escapist” fictions are the last refuge of the human spirit from the coming darkness.

Either way, people are counting on our ability to escape. They’re counting on the demented and relentless verve we had when we told ourselves the stories as if nobody was looking. Art is never stopping short, and if it is worth doing at all — worth the dedication of our lives — it’s worth overdoing, right?

School’s out, my friends. Go play.

“The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs” now available!

January 4, 2026 / Will Ludwigsen

My latest story for explorers of the nostalgic strange, “The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs,” appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Have you ever gazed up into the infinite cosmos at night with your family and observed a light in the sky moving in a way it shouldn’t? Maybe the light stopped suddenly and then started again. Maybe it skittered across your field of vision like a bug across a forest pond. Or maybe it wobbled and danced as though you were its only audience.

Your mom or her boyfriend may have told you it was a weather balloon or a military aircraft, or perhaps they called it a “trick of the light.”

What if I told you that sometimes, perhaps even often, your mom and her boyfriend are wrong?

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.