I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.

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.

You know how some people say that they can only read one story a day from this or that collection? If that's simply the result of the great tension and power condensed into each piece, all well and good.

I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.

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.

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.

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.