This is the tenth edition of The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is July 20th, 2020. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
It’s the afternoon on Monday. I spent most of the weekend working on an unannounced thing that is being fast-tracked along with a screenplay for an original pilot. I also got a new office chair, finished an incredible novel, and got stung by a wasp. It was a mile-a-minute weekend.
Finding Voice
In the time since my last newsletter, I’ve finished work on two different books. It’s always a strange process ending a massive writing project. There is no proper way to say goodbye. People are not reading the book/the ending yet so you’re left to mourn fictional people, places, and things mostly on your own.
But, I suppose, for me… that loss teaches me something. I end up examining everything I work on in retrospect and wondering what it’s done to my voice as a writer. There is this Neil Gaiman quote that always stuck with me “Most of us find our own voices only after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.”
This definitely rings true for me. I’ve found that my earlier work was always in service of something, usually one thing, rather than a multitude of sources and inspirations. I would clip my own wings to make my story more palatable and easier to fit into easily defined genre boxes.
Lately however, I’ve had a change of heart. My writing has evolved into this terrible creature that has a kaleidoscope of inspirations. It’s weirder, less compromising, and less like others. I’ve found that my voice seems most confident and comfortable when it’s oscillating between genres and storytelling methods. I want my work to engage with readers but also evolve as they spend time with it. What at first appears strange, overwhelming, and alien settles in around you and makes you an active participant within the narrative world.
Finding your voice is embracing your weird. The things about yourself that no one else can express or perhaps even see. It’s about doing strange and complex genre math in your head blending influences and tastes into something so wholly unique that only you could ever conceive of it. Perhaps that’s obvious… but it’s taken some time for me to see the patterns in my own work and evolve beyond my original tastemakers.
Anyway, my next stuff is going to be really really weird.
You’ve been warned.
The Memory Police
Over the last few weeks I’ve had the immense pleasure of reading Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. The novel centers around an unnamed protagonist on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast. On this island objects are disappearing and most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes. While a few imbued with the power to recall these lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
The book is a sweeping meditation on loss, the politics of self-erasure, and how we internalize oppression. It’s moving and beautiful. A profound read in these strange times of quarantine and covid-19. I couldn’t help but relate to the ideas of keeping little mementos hidden in our homes. Holding on to anything that reminds us of a different world.
This book is haunting and relentlessly weird. It was written in 1994, but only recently translated into English. Somehow, it is perhaps better suited for examination in 2020. To say it was far ahead of its time is an understatement.
Seek it out. It will change you.
Armillaria Foxfire
As mentioned above. I finished a pilot script for an original pilot just yesterday. I posted a name for it yesterday but forgot it was pulled from one of my older books. Despite this, the project has nothing to do with COME INTO ME. So I changed the title.
Behold ARMILLARIA FOXFIRE an eco-horror/tech thriller about fungus, viral infections, and Silicon Valley.
I Have No Lips
But I must speak.
This week’s playlist right here, right now:
Bye For Now
A short one this week, I’m afraid. I’ve been up to my ears in work and I’ve got another full day ahead of me. Just got off an incredibly exciting call about a new project for 2021 that should blow you all away. There is much work to do, my friends. I’m not going anywhere.
Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Disconnect. Share your passion and be kind to one another.
Z