What was the genesis of the story—what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?

I don’t normally have a simple answer for this kind of question, but just this once I know exactly where the story came from. It was a tweet pointing out the contractual loophole that’s at the heart of this particular heist. I’ve always been one part amused to two parts horrified by that kind of contract language—see also rights being valid “throughout the universe,” which strikes me as an especially optimistic view of the imminence of human habitation beyond Earth—so I was primed to take the idea and run with it. I think it was about five minutes from seeing the tweet to having a plot outline, and I say that as someone who normally looks at an outline and runs in the other direction. I wish I’d thought to save the tweet so I could say thank you for the inspiration!

Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

Well, to start with, I had no idea how to write a heist. I googled “how to structure a heist” and got a lot of “here are the one hundred and nineteen essential plot beats for a heist,” so that was a dead end, because I don’t believe in more than, I don’t know, two plot beats at a time. So then I watched a bunch of heist stuff in the hope that it would all just sort of passively pervade my mind. The Thomas Crown Affair, Leverage, and so on. Knives Out, which isn’t a heist, but I’m not gonna pass up the opportunity to watch Knives Out. My partner would come into the living room in the middle of the day and ask what I was doing. Watching five million episodes of Money Heist, obviously. No, listen, it’s research. Very important. I need to watch all four seasons to write this one novelette.

And then one day I was like, okay, I’m done, and wrote a barebones, nothing-but-plot draft in about two days. So in that sense it was easy.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

That first draft was the driest thing I’ve ever written. The characters were nothing but their roles in the plot. It was a very odd experience for me, because most of my stories start with character relationships. It’s an aspect of writing that’s always come naturally to me, and I found I was paradoxically bad at having to do it on demand. It took a few months to unlock the rest of the story. I showed the draft to a friend, and she pointed out that Nadja was kind of bad at her job, in that way where a character is doing what the plot demands even if it doesn’t make sense. What if, my friend asked, her being bad at her job was the point? Just like that, everything else made sense. Why would Foster hire a mediocre thief? Because the plan depended on it. Why? Well, maybe the security system is actually very unreliable. Why this mediocre thief? Because of her family history. And so on—it was a lot like that initial burst of inspiration, everything flowing downhill. After that it was only a matter of restructuring the story to add in those character flashbacks. It all felt inevitable in hindsight. I think people sometimes assume writing is always like this, but really it takes a lot of bashing of head against wall, a lot of rotating the pieces in your mind, to figure out the right question to ask. (Or, ideally, to have a friend figure it out for you. Thanks, Abby!)

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

First I have to shout out Rich Larson’s story “How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar,” which was what convinced me to attempt a heist at this length.

More generally, the book I finished most recently was The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, which is worth every bit of the praise it’s been getting. I just love books that play with narrative, that make you go oh, I want to do that, or something like that, or something completely different but I wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t read this first. I’m excited to get into Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water for the same reason.

Another book that’s stuck with me this past year has been Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars, which is simultaneously one of the tensest, most heart-wrenching books I’ve ever read—but also immensely readable and full of playful language. In that respect, I was reminded of Sofia Samatar—her prose is very different stylistically, but they both write the kinds of books that make me want to take a step back and just revel in the joy of writing itself. (And speaking of Samatar, her most recent book, The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain is near the top of my TBR pile!)

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

This last year or two my short fiction has taken a backseat while I worked on two different novels, a space opera and a secondary world fantasy, which I hope will eventually see the light of day. I did recently publish my first novella, Between Blades, which can be read free in Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine. Finally, I’m working on a whole arc of interrelated stories starring Josephine Foster as the central character, the second of which is almost done, so I hope to have more of her adventures to share in the future!