Will Ludwigsen

Will Ludwigsen is an American writer of horror, mystery, and science fiction. His work has appeared in a number of magazines including Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons as well as his first collection of short fiction, "Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! and Other Cosmic Insolence".

Ludwigsen was born on June 27, 1973, in Wilmington, Delaware. His family, lifelong New Yorkers, soon returned to Garden City, New York for the first five years of his life.

In 1979, he moved with his family to Englewood, Florida, where his parents Dianne and Bill Ludwigsen opened a bookstore. There, Ludwigsen spent weekends and summer afternoons reading books in the back room, most of them centering around his early interests in ghosts, vampires, missing people, UFOs, and other strange phenomena. Other childhood influences included role-playing and video games as well as early home computer programming. Ludwigsen also frequently cites his sister Karen's scratching at his window after a showing of Salem's Lot on television as the beginning of his interest in the macabre.

After the divorce of his parents, Ludwigsen spent a difficult adolescence in Arcadia, Florida where two events sparked his interest in writing fiction as a career. The first was reading "Roomer Has It" by Nancy C. Swoboda in the November 1985 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The second was meeting Norman Amemiya, a local science fiction fan who introduced him to science fiction fandom. Through these, he discovered that, contrary to his father's practical advice, adults routinely continued to enjoy horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and some even made money creating it. He resolved to do the same.

He earned his Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Florida in 1994, followed by a Master's in the same discipline at the University of North Florida in 2005. In 2006, he attended the Borderlands Boot Camp for horror writers and the Clarion East Writers Workshop.

His first accepted story, "Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby!" sold in 1999 but didn't appear in Weird Tales until 2002. Since then, he's sold close to thirty short stories. He writes a regular column for the Horror World web site as well as a blog at his own site.

From 1996 on, Ludwigsen has worked largely as a technical writing and training consultant for corporations and government agencies in both Jacksonville, Florida and Washington, DC, where he lived briefly from 2001 to 2002. He considers walking home to Alexandria, Virginia from his workplace near the Capitol Building during the 9/11 attacks to be a formative and focusing experience.

Ludwigsen, twice divorced, currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida with fellow writer Aimee Payne.

elected Publications

* "Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby!": Spring 2002, Weird Tales
* "Nessmass": Spring 2002, Whispers From the Shattered Forum #11
* "Representative Sample": Summer 2002, Artemis Magazine
* "The Trespasser": 2002, Cemetery Dance #40
* "And Justice for Doll": September 2003, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
* "Bingo": May 2004, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
* "Rubbernecker's Lament": October 2004, "Chiaroscuro"
* "Soured": 2005, Horrorfind (Honorable Mention, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #18, 2005)
* "Solidity": 2006, "Travel Guide to the Haunted Mid-Atlantic" (Honorable Mention, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #20, 2007)
* "Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby! and Other Cosmic Insolence": 2007, Lethe Press
* "Faraji": April/May 2007, Weird Tales
* "My Old Man's Seance": June/July 2007, Weird Tales
* "All Talk": March 2008, Strange Horizons
* "In Search Of": June 2008, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
* "A Good Psycho is Hard to Find": 2008, "Blood Lite" anthology

External links

* [http://www.will-ludwigsen.com/ Will Ludwigsen website]
* [http://www.horrorworld.org/columnsold.htm HorrorWorld column archives]