Very often, or perhaps more often, and even in very good collections - even in some of the best collections ever written, I would argue - it's because our "voicier" writers hew so closely to one given set of dictional tics that we as readers can't read the books all the way through in a single sitting, because if we did, the stories and their narrators would all start to bleed together.

Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

Realism's anxieties are not my anxieties, but I think I've had its tools close at hand all along. It may be that I'm reaching for them more often than I used to. On the other hand, I'm making no promises for the future. The material itself always gets the last word.

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what we remember - you're going to end up thinking (obliquely or otherwise) about what it means to act ethically, and I think that's all to the good.

What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words.

The biggest experiment there - and I was convinced for a really long time that it was going to fail horribly - had to do with this weird thing I do every now and then. Like everyone else, as a reader there are certain things that really rub me the wrong way in fiction - pet bugbears, let's call them.