I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

The story, I like to say and remember, is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that are much savvier and more complex than what you could come up with on your own. Find them with your marking pens as they emerge in your drafts. Become a student of your work in progress. Look for what your material is telling you about your material. Every aspect of a story has its own story.

I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.

So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.

I really like the interplay between thinking of text as ephemeral and thinking of it as a concrete, physical thing. With almost anything that I write, I'll stay completely immersed in the electronic text of it for a period of time and in another period, I'll stay immersed in it as a physical thing that can cut your skin. So with the apocalypses, I had them taped all over the wall and they had codes on them. Sometimes I would color code them in terms of thematic elements, sometimes in terms of voice, sometimes visual forms or images.

The short story is so much about inevitability and this feeling that things always had to be this one way, and I wanted the apocalypses to blow that idea apart. I hope it feels that way. I hope the book invites people to read the stories in order and then, if they feel like it, maybe not read them in order the next time.

Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well.