My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period (seven years, in this case, unless you count that 14-year story, which I hope you won’t) and what you’re really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces—trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work. So I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that (really I’m actively trying not to think about them, because doing that can cause you to truncate the natural energy that your subconscious is giving off). Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book (and in a more profound way than would have occurred if I’d tried to ‘put them’ there.)