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.

I love night markets, and I love magical market stories. So of course I wanted one day to write one myself! I was also thinking about parenthood, about the baggage that we bring to it, about learning to be open and present even when that’s really hard. About vulnerability and defensiveness in general. And about the inevitable calluses that we acquire through life, the armor that we don to survive.

I did a lot of digging into the idea of “closure” and how looking for closure can become detrimental. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-adjusted you are. Like a dog chasing a bird, you can chase closure right over the edge of a cliff. The narrator of “The Last Lucid Day” is someone who has done the homework: He’s likely been in years of therapy; he knows the language of complex trauma, parental neglect, attachment styles, and so on.

Sometimes when I am not doing anything serious I allow different thoughts to run freely in my head. One of those many thoughts was wondering how cool it would be for humans to be able to see into the future.

I play tabletop role playing games, though that leads to a lot more writing, hah! I currently run two concurrent campaigns—one Blades in the Dark, and one VtM, on alternate weekends, and guide my players through a play-by-post campaign set alongside the main campaign during the week.

The mechas in this story were extremely inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime which has also driven a lot of my past writing. The mechas in Evangelion (spoiler) must be implanted with a core containing the soul of the pilot’s mother in order to function properly.