Iain Thomas on Intentional Dissonance, I Wrote This For You, Love And Sadness At The End Of The World

Note: These questions are compiled from emails sent by readers and friends, rather than respond to each one individually, I've taken them and turned them into this.

Tell us about the new book.

Intentional Dissonance is a book I’ve been writing on the side of my commitments to I Wrote This For You. You know all those days I didn’t update I Wrote This For You? I was writing Intentional Dissonance. I Wrote This For You can cannibalize things that I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll start writing something, look at it, and say “That would make a brilliant post on I Wrote This For You” and so I take it out of whatever I’m doing and put it over there. Intentional Dissonance is the one project where I’ve done my best to avoid that, it hasn’t sacrificed anything to become itself, so to speak.

That doesn’t really tell us anything about the story…

Sorry. The story follows a young man named Jon Salt through his childhood and his twenties, it’s set in a kind of parallel world where the world has ended for all intents and purposes. As a child, he’s a loner and one night, after meeting and falling in love with a girl called Michelle, he discovers he has a strange ability to make his thoughts real. Then the world ends and things get a little crazy. He becomes addicted to a drug called Sadness that makes him sad, amongst other things. I don’t want to give too much away but at its heart, the book is about a relationship that gets destroyed and how it destroys the person it leaves behind.

So it’s science fiction? Do you think that’ll alienate people who read I Wrote This For You?

I hope not. Intentional Dissonance is science fiction in the same way that I Wrote This For You is poetry – it’s because there isn’t a better name and amazon has to classify it somehow. A good story or piece of writing transcends genre. The only reason it’s science fiction is because there were moments I wanted to create that could only exist in a fantastical world and so I had to create that fantastical world. There’s definitely parts of the book that people who read I Wrote This For You will be able to relate to, Jon’s relationship with Michelle reads like a primer guide to I Wrote This For You quite often.

What influenced you when you were writing this?

I read almost anything and everything, except science fiction ironically enough, although I really enjoyed Bruce Sterling when I was younger. When I was writing this, I remembered reading The Dragonlance Chronicles as a teenager and loving those books and I’ve tried to recreate the sense of adventure I found in them and at the same time, I’ve also been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami, which influenced the amount of magical realism I’ve employed. I’ve also recently read Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, the biography of David Foster Wallace and a lot of his philosophy has infected mine, in terms of trying to find something sincere and saying it, avoiding irony and cynicism and trying to create something that isn’t always easy to read.

What do you mean by that?

I think many writers are taught that simple writing is always better writing but reading David Foster Wallace has created a bit of a paradigm shift in the way I think, I think being challenged can be rewarding. There’s tons of little moments, names of things, places and people that if you spent a minute on google finding out about, you’ll be intensely rewarded by.

Can you give us an example?

There’s different variants of the Sadness drug that Jon’s addicted to, there’s Saudade, Limmerence, Stendhal Syndrome, Dutch Tears, Rose Cottage – each of the names comes from something I found fascinating or intriguing.

Where does the story take place?

It takes place in the last city on Earth, NewLand, which isn't in any country specifically.

If you're a South African writer, why isn't it set in South Africa?

Because South Africa is a country obsessed with race, culture and where and how you grew up. I'm sick of it. I've been sick of it since I was born I think. That hatred of the classification of people based on how they look or where they were born, is a large part of the motivation behind I Wrote This For You, to create something that exists beyond all those things, that anyone can read and say "I've felt this way before."

Why the name “Intentional Dissonance”

Like with I Wrote This For You, there’s a sense of vagueness and ‘noise’ that I employ throughout the book to keep people on their toes and to allow them to find their own meaning in the story – the noise, the dissonance, this is something I’ve created on purpose. I believe good writing is like a Rorschach test that lets you find out a little bit more about yourself as you experience it.

You did something cool with the cover, can you tell us about that?

Sure, we’ve done a bunch of covers where I’ve taken the image, converted it into audio, then read out my name and a small part of the book, then converted all the audio back into an image. The result is that each cover looks different and the noise I’ve created ties in nicely with what I call the emotional ergonomic of the book. These are only available through my publisher.

Thanks.

Thank you, I hope you enjoy it.