Connie Willis

You gotta hear this." 'Cause when it got real late at night, I think from like midnight to 2:00 or 4:00, that's when they did, uh, Dreamland, which was the even weirder, uh, woo woo stories and, and guests.

But I was driving home, and I believe, uh, Connie Willis was the guest host that night, uh, filling in, and she was interviewing this guy, Terry Lovelace.

He began to talk about his abduction story, and, uh, it blew my mind.

It's because unlike...

Now that we're talking about being in a historical era, not really grounded in a historical era, but having fantastical elements.

Although this is sci-fi, I was thinking of Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel series, particularly the ones that were set in World War II were just incredibly immersive in that time period.

Yeah.

I didn't see that.

I'm going to be looking for a Daniel Stelzer for the next few years of the comp for sure.

And it reminds me a little bit of Connie Willis's time travel series, which is basically the idea is that they discovered time travel, but because you couldn't change anything and you couldn't take anything back, everyone got really bored with it except historians.

And it's like a poor, underfunded academic department in the future.

Yeah.

This episode, we are talking about how to take your personal history and reflect that in your writing.

A thing I think about a lot is Connie Willis once wrote, I think, an introduction to a short story that she published about how... you don't need to have gone to alien worlds to write about them.

That nothing is stranger than your neighbor's Tupperware party or something along those lines, right? That your lived experience can truly inform anything that you want to write, no matter how speculative, no matter how much of a reach it seems initially, you can take the experiences that you have in your life, which I promise you are interesting.

I know a lot of people think their lives aren't that interesting or think that they're boring, but The internal emotions that you feel, the experiences that you have are translatable and legible to other people through fiction in ways that I think are very affirming and joyful and fascinating.

I would never do that.

And that these are all things that are accessible to me.

And as Connie Willis says, you know, that they are things that are, my normal is somebody else's weird.

Right.

And I have mentioned it on other Incomparable episodes.

It's To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.

And if you enjoy P.G. Wodehouse, if you enjoy Dorothy Sayers, this is right in that sort of general imaginary England with... just sharply written characters.

It is an utter delight.

yeah yeah so uh i i love to hear that um i i probably read about that same amount every year um i i have a few favorite auto buys like uh uh jim butcher who writes the harry dresden series that's again a mash-up of mystery and uh fantasy it's like an urban fantasy and of course louise penny she's just the master of mystery writing.

And then I was talking with someone the other day about science fiction writer Connie Willis.

They had just read her book, The Doomsday Book, which came out in the 80s, I think.

She is such a great writer and underrated, I think, even though she's won so many awards in the science fiction community like Hugo's and Nebula's.

And he rented out this house, this big house and, uh, I had had quite a bit to drink.

And then George, I was talking to Connie Willis, who's my idol.

And I heard George wanted to go into the other room and say some things.

And I said, cool, I'm gonna stay here and talk to Connie.