So I had a nice little email exchange yesterday with an editor from Long-Established Small Press. Mr. Editor (as opposed to Ms. Editor from Well-Respected University Press) expressed interest in getting a book of fiction from me, most likely a collection of stories.

He would prefer it to be a themed collection. "Collections work best," he writes, "when we can put enough of a theme on them to treat them as fixups—have you got enough related stories to treat that way? Something very closely related is best; if not, put a bunch of unrelated stories in a stack and pitch me a theme. (Look twice, or three times; they may be related in more ways than one.)"

Well, I've been working slowly on a series of stories that share a related background—in and around the planet Netherheim—but there aren't enough of them yet for a whole book. In fact, one of those stories is my Nebula nominee, "Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites," and I'm actually hoping to write three more novellas about the same characters and try to publish them in their own separate book. So I'm even further away from a Netherheim fixup that it would appear at first glance.

Of my other stories, I'm thinking I could pull a dozen or so together and lump them under a theme of "people trying desperately to communicate and failing." Most would be published already, but a handful would be good stories from the trunk that for whatever reason haven't found a home yet.

I'm mulling over titles now. Missed Connections. Garbled Transmissions. Lost in Translation. Can You Hear Me Now? Veiled References. Veiled Threats.

Most of those titles suck, but I'm thinking failures of communication is a strong theme.