Category: Writing (Page 2 of 3)

Oh, yeah: Gratitude

November 23, 2023 / Will Ludwigsen

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’!

Interpersonal

Of course I’m grateful for the family, friends, colleagues, and inanimate objects that support me every day, no matter how difficult I make it.
We had a great Willcon this year, enjoying some gaming and ribald conversation with old friends and new.

It was wonderful to take a family vacation with my sister, brother-in-law, and nieces to Great Britain for a few weeks this summer, something we’ve done very infrequently over our lives. Even getting COVID couldn’t slow down our good time (or endless walking).

Visiting the Natural History Museum at Oxford

As annoying as it was to spend FIVE WEEKS as a juror in a civil trial, I appreciated the chance to meet people I’d never have encountered in my normal life and see things from their perspectives, however wrong. (I kid, I kid!)
My immediate team at work has never been just a group of coworkers, and not just because I bully them all the time to go out to lunch together at Tony D’s. I decidedly DON’T appreciate the layoff that sent most of them off to better destinies, but I AM very grateful that they continue to influence my life.
We’ve got a pretty good team of cats at home, two older boys and two younger ones, who fill our hearts with love and our lungs with dander. Our famous dog Sylvia, mayor of the neighborhood, will now occasionally listen to reason between trying to tear pizza out of our hands and barking during work meetings.

All the cats: Oscar, Truman, Harold, and Harlan

Aimee, of course, remains awesome, very tolerant of my quirks and difficulties.

Professional

Though I miss my lost team members at my day job, I’m grateful my company decided to keep me around for their own mysterious reasons. They’ve always been tolerant and often even bemused by the weirdness I bring to my work.
There’s something to be said after a layoff for how it sure clarifies who you can trust to help get things done, including my boss.

Writing

I actually finished a short story this year after a time we’re politely calling “fallow.” It’s made it to a second round of consideration at one of my favorite magazines, so maybe you’ll read it one of these days. (People liked it when I read it at Willcon, at least politely.)
The well-known publisher that was considering my novella A Scout is Brave decided to pass after a whirlwind 850 days, which is either a compliment that it was so hard to decide or an insult that it wasn’t easier to decide.
And the reason I’m grateful for that? A Scout is Brave has found its real home at Lethe Press and will be appearing next June. Don’t worry: I won’t let you forget that in the coming months.

Emotional

This has been a very strange year, and I couldn’t have done it without the fistful of medications that my doctor prescribed to keep me alive during it.
In a similar vein, I’m glad to have reached an age where I know enough about my strengths and weaknesses to work WITH them instead of against them. You call it depression, I call it introspection! You call it a rude disregard for the feelings of others, I call it a child-like honesty! You call it ADHD, I call it a need for novelty and challenge!

Inanimate Objects

I’m glad I figured out (with no help from three visits to the dealership) what the rattling noise under my car was before I just drove it off a bridge.
I’m enjoying a board game these days called HeroQuest which is like Dungeons and Dragons for impatient people fearful of commitment.

Family playing HeroQuest at Thanksgiving — I even persuaded the family to try HQ on our early Thanksgiving.

Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2 have been boon companions for the last few months. I wish I could quit you!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks were fantastic this year.
I’m also thankful for the new (and very expensive) pipe that allows my bodily wastes to go out to Jacksonville’s sewer system instead of just kind of seeping under my lawn.

..and Finally…

I’m grateful for you, supporting my intense desire to capture the world in words!

Ten Years? It Seems Like Yesterday!

November 1, 2023 / Will Ludwigsen

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.

Here, my mother gives back a little of the ol’ tune up to his ashes at Thanksgiving in 2013.

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.

I was glad that we had the chance to play D&D one last time, at least.

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.

Join Me at Necronomicon in Tampa, 9/22 – 24

September 7, 2023 / Will Ludwigsen

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:

Remaining Sane While Working with Publishing Professionals (9am)
Meanwhile: Day Jobs and Financial Wisdom for Creatives (10am)

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?

Writing, Huh! What Is It Good For?

April 1, 2023 / Will Ludwigsen

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.

Portrait of the artist as a creepy young boy. — Portrait of the artist as a creepy young boy, lurking and noticing and framing a story.

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.

Member at large of the Dead Poets Society.

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.

I don’t know, maybe a dignified pose like this one?
(Photo by Ray Rodil)

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.

Reading at Chamblin's back in the day. — Like some of these oddballs.

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.

Might As Well Write

December 12, 2022 / Will Ludwigsen

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.

Perhaps Living a Little TOO Deliberately

July 27, 2022 / Will Ludwigsen

Earlier this week, I crossed a threshold: after keeping a daily log of my activities consistently since June of 2001 and filling in others from calendars and journals, I logged my 9,075th day. Of those, 9,011 are in my lifetime out of 17,924 days alive.

That’s 50.3%…a majority of my life.

I’m not sure what kind of achievement that really is, though I’m astonished I’ve managed to write 1.5 million words. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is only 1.27 million words. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson weighs in at a mere 943,000 words. And the King James Bible is comparatively a haiku at 783,137 words.

(This guy has a journal that is 35 million words, but he works on it four hours a day and documents his bowel movements. Mine is a little more reader-friendly.)

I suspect you have questions.

Why would someone write a daily journal like this in addition to 50+ narrative notebooks and a log of 1,975 dreams?

To avoid writing anything important or saleable is my best guess.

No, really. Why did the idea come to you?

Hey, at least I’m not mooching off Emerson like ol’ Henry here.

When I started the log, I was having a hard time adjusting after college to working a normal job, and I felt that I was losing my days to endless emails and meetings and project plans instead of living the life of adventure I assumed was my destiny.

I began the log hoping that, like Thoreau, I would “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I decided that I wanted to pay closer attention to how I spent my days in the hopes that I would spend them better.

And have you spent them better?

Almost certainly not. I suspect I may have accidentally documented a Gen-Xer’s desperate search for significance with as little effort as possible in the fading years of our American civilization.

Some college’s American History department will be very pleased to take this journal off Aimee’s hands when I die, and the Psychology department next door will be even happier to correlate it with the dream journal to find out what was wrong with me.

Some poor grad student will read it and think, “Man, this is like Willy Loman documenting his own decline to nothingness.”

What are the technical specifications of the log?

It’s in XML, essentially a text file marked with tags for data about each day (the month, the day, the year, and what happened).

When I enter each day into the log, I open log.xml in a code editor (Visual Studio Code these days because other text editors can’t open a file that large), copy a previous entry so I don’t have to retype the tags, and then I update it for the day’s events.

When I want to display the file, I use an XSL stylesheet that can either display a chronological listing or all of the entries with the same month and day (so I can know what happened on this day in my personal history).

How accurate is the log?

For events before I began consistently entering data, I have compiled events and their dates from a variety of sources: journals, genealogical information, newspapers, emails, blog posts, correspondence, postcards, photographs, and legal records.

Also, my mother filled out her calendar with the events of the day, which was handy for research.

(And also the reminder, I guess, that I have a good deal in common with her.)

Have there been any benefits to keeping a daily log?

A few:

It’s been handy to do a search by today’s date to see patterns in my life (creative surges in summer and fall, depression in the late winter, that kind of thing).
It used to impress the hell out of my government jobs when they needed data for clearance checks.
It actually does give me a moment to consider how I’ve spent my day and imagine ways to spend the next one better.
It’s great for reminding people of weird things we’ve done together, such as when my friend Tom commented out of nowhere from the backseat of my car on July 21, 2000, that the most humiliating thing you could do to a defeated opponent is shit on their back.
It’s also handy for documenting things that cause bad outcomes (such as foods or medications that make me sick).

What patterns have you seen?

Word count analysis shows some interesting things.

The single most mentioned person is Aimee, with 9,261 mentions.
There are 10,938 mentions of read and 2,027 of “read and nap.”
There are 2,261 appearances of “LOTRO,” which is the game Lord of the Rings Online.
Luckily, there are 3,087 of “write” and 2,699 of “writing.”

I lead a surprisingly (and sometimes disappointingly) simple life of writing, napping, reading, playing games, tinkering with electronics or Legos, and running.

Is there a downside to keeping that log?

Probably the most disappointing aspect of the log is how boring it is to read. Yes, I do make some snide editorial comments here and there, but for the most part, it’s a reference of what happened. For narrative and insight, I write in a normal journal (though not daily).

It’s hard not to wonder if the very act of documenting each day has made them less likely to be interesting. If I was living a truly adventuresome life, I wouldn’t have time to document my own shit. That’d be up to historians.

What will be the fate of the log, do you think?

Well, I’ll keep writing it, I suppose, though I’m considering doing so in slightly less daily detail. There are 4,374 mentions of “retire to bed and read,” my nightly ritual, which I think can now be taken for granted.

I’ve always thought that if I’m not remembered for the quality of my work, I can at least be remembered for the weird novelty of it. It’s best to hear, “Holy shit, HOW did he do that?”, but I’m okay with, “Holy shit, WHY did he do that?”

I suppose the big question for me is whether there’s still time to make the rest of that journal more interesting than the first half. I hope so.

P.J. O’Rourke

February 15, 2022 / Will Ludwigsen

“She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

– P.J. O’Rourke on reluctantly backing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump

During my first semester of college, I took a course called History of Journalism with a wonderful professor named William McKeen. It was an inspiring and entertaining tour through Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Studs Terkel, Woodward and Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, and many more.

The class was so good that I almost became a journalist until Professor McKeen pointed out that the future would be all USA Today infotainment, a prescient notion in 1991.

Like most recently post-adolescent young men, Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo aghast-witness-to-society’s-collapse schtick appealed to me strongly. I could imagine writing riotous features about myself witnessing the inanity of our culture: “It’s Will…at a gun show!” “It’s Will…at the Cabbage Patch Doll headquarters!” “It’s Will…at the ruins of the Manson family’s ranch!”

The trouble was that I wasn’t cool enough to be Hunter S. Thompson. I didn’t drink or do drugs, I was nervous approaching people, and I couldn’t often summon the energy to be manic like he was.

What I needed was a nerdier, more introspective yet still hilarious journalistic idol, so Professor McKeen suggested I might dig P.J. O’Rourke.

I started with his book Holidays in Hell (excellent) and went on to Republican Party Reptile (meh) and then Parliament of Whores (probably his best), and I’ve followed him on and off ever since. In recent years, he was sometimes as stylistically conservative as he was philosophically, and some of his humor could feel a bit tepid, like an affable but exasperated dad.

But at his best, he wielded his satiric scalpel with precision and eloquence. He’s one of the main reasons I was a conservative in college: he made it feel dignified and reasonable to believe that applying government to our fleeting problems was like swatting a fly with a sheet of plywood.

(These days, I’m inclined to think that as clumsy as that sheet of plywood can be, some of our societal flies are big enough to need it.)

P.J. could cover a Communist revolution in some banana republic mostly from the bar, downing some scotch and smoking cigars and asking real people what they thought about the absurd situation. Maybe that’s as posed as Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo journalism, but it’s certainly more my temperament.

I’ve disagreed with much of what he’s written, especially later on, but he was always wrong within normal parameters…and usually entertaining and never hostile about it. To him, the culture war was less an all-out battle and more a slightly embarrassing brawl in a bar between the loudest blowhards.

I eventually drifted more toward fiction (partly because it seemed to have a clearer path of entry and partly because I can’t resist exaggerating and distilling the truth), but O’Rourke’s wry observational style still influences my work.

I’m grateful for that influence and I’ll miss him in the world.

Decoded: 1977 Devil’s Tower Incident

September 4, 2021 / Will Ludwigsen

Hello! Glad you could make it out tonight after deciphering the simplest invitation we could lower ourselves to imagine.

While our scientists teach you a “basic tonal vocabulary,” we’re sending a real message encoded on this frequency that will probably take you half a century to noodle out.

First, thanks for loaning us these humans for our longitudinal qualitative study of your species. Sorry and no hard feelings for any scare or inconvenience we caused.

Truth be told, many of them were tedious guests, turning away from our tour of a sublime and wondrous universe on the viewscreen to ask if we had any “snacks” or where they could “get laid.” The little girl was okay, and this recent little boy, and it goes without saying that the dog was the best of the lot, a very good boy.

All this leads to our second message, which is that your planet is fucked.

If we thought you could understand our raw findings, we’d share them with you, but suffice to say that we’ve observed staggering assholery of both the accidental (greed, self-interest, delusion, ignorance) and purposeful (murder, rape, war, intolerance, exploitation) kinds during our study. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for you to tell them apart because the purposeful assholery is causing the accidental.

You have weeds in your garden, but they look exactly like the crops.

Not that you’d notice, because you’re terrible stewards of that garden. But you know that and don’t care, which is why we’re coming back in half a century to pick up your bauxite from what we assume will be a smoldering cinder.

So try not to fuck up the bauxite, at least.

We’d hoped to pick up a small group of your most perceptive souls by summoning them with dreams and visions, but the rest of you blocked them from coming.

Which is so much the story of humanity that we should have predicted it.

We’re left with this one guy, though his eagerness to ditch his family gives us pause. He’ll serve as a good enough representative sample to preserve the memory of your species.

Well, it’s getting late and there’s only so long we can dazzle you with flashing lights and music before you get bored and start shooting us.

Best of luck, and remember to save us some bauxite.

Might as Well Write

July 18, 2021 / Will Ludwigsen

Not long ago, a friend of mind pointed out that I seem to enjoy giving advice to smart and/or creative people who need an emotional nudge toward feeling better about doing the things they love. I did a little digging, and maybe he’s right:

Advice for a Wunderkind

Dropping In an an Old Friend in 1968

That One Time I Tried to Be Inspiring

Books for Fiction Writers

I also enjoyed helping student writers when I taught, offering my idiosyncratic advice on how to actually write, sure, but also on how to be the kind of person who can at least endure and maybe even thrive in a creative life.

So I decided to create a new blog called Might As Well Write where, like Cheryl Strayed in her Dear Sugar columns, I accept questions from creative people on subjects ranging from day jobs to detail and answer them with the homespun country wisdom I learned at my pappy’s knee.

Or at least the wisdom I learned by wringing tepid success from a lifetime of possibility.

The title comes from the idea that many creative people seem to have about whether it’s “worth” writing, whether all the time is justified by fame or sales or appreciation. I used to wonder that, too, until I eventually confessed a simple truth to myself:

What the hell else am I doing? Is writing for ninety minutes a night taking time away from drilling clean wells in Bangladesh? Of course not. I might as well write, tinkering and fishing my way to a readers perhaps one at a time.

So Might As Well Write isn’t a blog about finding instant fame or going viral. It isn’t about eleven sure-fire story structures that jack directly into our primitive brains. It isn’t about

It’s about treating our creative selves well so that we can persist and grow little by little into people pursuing something like art.

So drop on by subscribe to the Twitter feed, and maybe even ask a question!

Forever is Composed of Nows

March 18, 2021 / Will Ludwigsen

My friend and publisher Steve Berman has started a new online periodical called Bachelors, and the first issue includes my story “Forever is Composed of Nows” among other good stories by people like Nick Mamatas and L.A. Fields.

The magazine, as you may discern from the cover image, is of particular interest to gay readers, and my story has a gay protagonist.

FAQ about my stories with gay protagonists:

Q: Are you…gay?

A: What’s it to you either way?

Q: Well, it makes me wonder if you’re, like, writing from the heart or jumping on the lucrative Big Queer bandwagon that’s driving down our reproductive rate in direct contradiction to the Lord’s insistence to fill a quiver of blessed crusading children.

A: Wow, you’re a weirdo and that’s not a question, but let me address it anyway in four bullets of escalating emotional importance:

The protagonists of my stories tend to be unusually perceptive and aware and imaginative outsiders wondering what to do in a world full of assholes…a struggle of particular pertinence to the LGBTQ community by ugly necessity.

In some of my stories such as “Acres of Perhaps” and “Forever is Composed of Nows,” I needed a particular kind of outsider with a particular kind of perception who would have a particular kind of emotional experience, and a straight person just didn’t fit because they can take too much acceptance for granted.

Though I wasn’t particularly homophobic as a kid – I got teased for being “gay” even though I wasn’t – I probably wasn’t the kind of person any of my closeted friends would have come out to without me being weird(er) and awkward(er). I want to be more welcoming now.

Many of the people I deeply care about identify as queer, and some of my stories are gifts to them.

Q: What do you know about the queer experience?

A: Not enough, but then, I don’t know enough about anybody else’s experience, either. I try to be a good ally to my friends, and for some reason, I identify strongly with people who don’t always feel safe being themselves. I don’t need a cookie for that.

Q: That slowly moving cottage in “Remembrance is Something Like a House”…

A: Totally gay.