Biography

Will Ludwigsen was born to simple parents in a frontier cabin. Reading by gaslight, he managed to obtain a crude education from patent medicine advertisements and religious tracts. His sister, Corn Queen of Western Illinois, later went on to play a fleeing passenger in the Poseidon Adventure. His father invented a machine for losing chess games in three moves or less, largely by knocking over all the pieces.

Okay, none of that is true.

Will Ludwigsen was technically born in Wilmington, Delaware, but he moved to New York so soon after his birth that he considers that the Freudian womb of his unconscious sensibilities.

Inexplicably seeking a better life in Florida, his family moved to the southern Gulf coast when he was five. They opened a bookstore renowned among locals for its wide selection of books about shells, snakes, fish, and tropical plants. His mother, the genetic wellspring of his imaginative and impractical side, was responsible for stocking the Atari 2600 and Dungeons & Dragons books in the store as well, though they didn't sell to the elderly population.

When not lurking in the backroom of his parents' store gingerly reading books before putting them back, he tinkered with computers, rode his bicycle around the neighborhood, and swam in the pool until his hair turned green.

Books had a strong effect on him. While all the other little boys were leaving the elementary school library with books about sharks and motorcycles, he was leaving with ones about UFOs, missing persons, ghosts, vampires, and crime. He also had a strange fascination for the 50s thanks to an old copy of the Boy Scout Handbook, and he was disappointed to discover that no one made soap box derby cars anymore because no one made soap boxes anymore.

To this day, he is convinced that the discrepancy between books and "real life" is more a problem with real life's limited imagination than with the "accuracy" of books.

His middle school years were a whirl of parental divorce, acne, bad grades, terrible fashion, morbid desperation for teen romance, and surly disdain for authority. Then he met Norman Amemiya, who changed everything.

Norman introduced him to science fiction, fantasy, horror, and gaming fandom--demonstrating that "growing up" did not require abandoning what one loved for practicality. While reading a story in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, it occurred to Will that someone actually produced it: a writer.

Maybe he could be one. The jury is still out.

In high school, he wrote terrible, terrible yearbook articles until getting kicked off the staff for using big words. He then wrote terrible, terrible movie reviews for the school paper. In his spare time, he wrote terrible, terrible short stories. He wooed girls with terrible, terrible notes, too.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Florida in 1994, and ill-advisedly started graduate school immediately afterwards. He quit when he discovered he liked making things up more than finding them out.

He then started a career in technical writing that persists to this day. He secretly has come to despise computers and considers his work in technical writing a form of insurgency against them, explaining their mysteries to the people they have enslaved.

He recently completed his Master of Arts degree in English after a pleasant decade lull--just long enough to mature as a writer and critic. This time around, he "discovered" Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Walter Pater, and many other authors to admire, all theorists in the art of lying he loves so much.

All things considered, he'd rather be an English professor, but he can't afford the wages or get a job in the current glut of factory critical theorists who ape Derrida to please the academic establishment.

His first story sale was "Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby!" to Weird Tales in 1999, though it didn't appear until 2002. Before that were six years of intermittent writing of gimmicky stories and jokes spread thinly across a narrative.

He's better now. Sort of.

In January of 2001, he moved to Washington DC. On September 11th, he walked home from his office near the Capitol building, ruminating that the passengers of Flight 93 might have saved his life and those of many other people in the area. He hopes to make it worth their trouble.

Tired of traffic, hysterical anthrax panics, and surly neighbors, Will returned to Jacksonville where he now lives with fellow writer Aimee Payne and two greyhounds, Graham and Patti.

He's finishing a novel that he hopes to soon inflict upon the world.