Pixel Juice is a collection of fifty short stories, only six of which the reader may have seen elsewhere, and even those six have been "remixed" in some way. The vast majority of the stories were written specially for the collection. Why is this such a rare occurrence?

Most writers view collections as merely an opportunity to mop up all the stories they have already produced for magazines, newspapers and anthologies. The idea of sitting down to write a collection of stories from scratch is seen as such a novelty that when I told other writers of my plans for Pixel Juice , the overwhelming response was one of disbelief. This is a shame, I think, because of the opportunities for creativity that the original volume allows.

Specifically, it allows the writer to view the collection as a kind of deconstructed novel. The stories fall into certain patterns, the same images or themes keep cropping up, and these connections can be exploited by the writer to produce, one hopes, a more exciting reading experience. Quite explicit links can be formed, perhaps by having the same characters or locations appear in different stories; or the links can be more obscure--a mere glimpse of a once-seen atmosphere, or else a repeating sequence of smoky mirror-images. The reader can be lead gently into this web of connections, and there urged to explore the terrain.

Another advantage of creating an original collection, is that more experimental stories can be included--the kind of textual adventures or broken narratives, that wouldn't necessarily be suitable for a magazine story, say. So, although Pixel Juice has it's fair share of meat-and-two-veg stories, it is also filled with other, more teasing morsels: adverts for weird products, for instance; or product-recalls for weird gadgets that go wrong in weird ways; and dub stories, where I play linguistic games with the imagery from an existing story; and moments where one story is mixed into another, very much like a DJ works with two vinyl records. It was only in the writing of Pixel Juice that experiments like these presented themselves to me. There is a freedom is to be exploited. Basically, I was encouraged in the writing to have as much fun as possible.

The main advantage of the original collection, however, it that the writer can view the book has having an overarching narrative structure of its own. The stories can be arranged to create a feeling of movement, of emotional change. To make this slightly more clear, I arranged the stories into four sections, each with their own title, and atmosphere. It's quite a nebulous arrangement this, but satisfying, in a different way to the more rigorous structure of a novel.

The writing of Pixel Juice was supremely enjoyable. There is something very pleasing about the act of balancing the needs of each individual story with the overall needs of the book. I do hope this enjoyment comes across to the reader.