WILL WILLOUGHBY, WRITER AND EDITOR
I'm a writer who makes a perfectly respectable living as an editor. My short fiction (current or upcoming) can be found in Epiphany, Pangyrus, Defenestration, and elsewhere. Hailed as having "much to admire" by the New Yorker's boilerplate rejection email, my work often features characters facing absurd, comically sad situations.
I earned my English degree from the University of New Hampshire and now live with my wife and daughter in southern Maine. My hobbies include making things, doing escape rooms, and having one-sided conversations with my potato-colored dog, Charlie.
Reach out with any questions, story ideas, complaints—whatever's on your mind.
"He's not unreasonable, he tells me. But he's genuinely alarmed by the extent of the first-round edits. Entire captions have been rewritten. Much has been cut. Actual names—the town hall—have been lowercased. Passive voice has been used."
"There's a sleeper down in the theater. I've seen them before, these sleepers, and never know what to do."
A Perfectly Reasonable Response
The Piker Press, May 2024
"The café itself isn't disgusting. It has everything required by Maine state law: charming brick walls, a heady dark-roast smell, soulful people slouched over laptops."
"It's a nice slide deck. Ginormous graphs. Crushing overall length. It's the verbiage itself. It's too—what's the word?—too comprehensible.”
"Since I got back from leave, I've been off. Like there’s this hissy static in my head all day. And I don't sleep. I rest, or I stay in bed for a long time without moving, but that's not sleep, not really."
Visions and Revisions
MIDLVLMAG (coming soon)
"He says he'll ruin me. That's his word: ruin."
Short Fiction
PENDING
Honored to say that Downstream Benefits, a short story exploring themes of communication and depression against an absurd corporate backdrop, has been accepted by Pangyrus. I can't think of a better home for this story. Stay tuned.
So thrilled that my short story Visions and Revisions, in which a pizza worker reflects on his comically sad failures, has been accepted for an upcoming issue of MIDLVLMAG. Not sure when it'll be published (guessing sometime in the summer of 2024). In the meantime, go read all available issues of this amazing magazine. That's an order.
In The Intimacy of Perception, a Fellini-obsessed film student unreliably narrates a quiet story in which he's oblivious to something right in front of him. Out for consideration.
Crushing guilt, familial dysfunction, and suffocating silence are the backyard games on tap for a Fourth of July barbeque in Winning at Chicken. Out for consideration.
If you're looking for a flash fiction piece with an overly long title and a jaded AI main character, consider Looks Like You're Writing a Term Paper Full of Grammatical Errors and Clichés, but Keep It Up, You're Doing Great. Out for consideration.
IN PROGRESS
Das Booth, a short story in which a projectionist reflects on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as expressed in 1980s screwball comedies, is cooling its heels until I can think of a different angle. I guess that means it's both a story and not a story.
After overhauling my short story Exit Strategy, I've set it aside to gain some perspective. Other titles I'm considering: Anything Other Than Whatever This Is, How to Abandon Ship, Hungry.
FYI, I've frameworked a preliminary iteration of another jargon-based short story. Tentative title is Agenda: Unpacking a Dream I Had with Several of You in It, Q4 Results If Time. Guesstimate on completion is somewhere between I have no idea and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Keep it on your radar!
I'm not sure if Baby Driver (better title TK) is a short story, a novella, or a novel, but it's in the works. Current first line: "At seven months of age, Janie was not licensed to drive."
