Spotlight: Squeak Thief

It's out!

I’ve posted excerpts from this book before, but now that it’s out, it’d be nice to do a proper spotlight on it.

The idea for this book has been kicking around for a while. I love heist stories and have always wanted to do one, and when I watched the movie How To Steal A Million, I had the idea to borrow part of the plot. The movie is about the daughter of an art forger who has loaned one of his pieces to a museum, but the insurance policy means they will have someone appraise it and find out it’s a fake. To preserve his reputation, his daughter teams up with a thief to steal the piece before it can be evaluated.

Coupled with that, I wanted to write about a cocky rich kid and a more serious, experienced, older thief. So I cobbled together a plot and serialized it on my Patreon over the course of almost a year.

I really like how the relationship between the two main characters evolves over the course of the book, and I’m pleased with the heist—maybe more so, because I don’t usually write complicated plots. That was my challenge to myself in this book, to make a plot that would be exciting and keep readers guessing.

The way I usually write plot is to put my characters in situations and then think, “How would they get out of this using the resources available to them?” If there isn’t a way, sometimes I need a side character to help out, but fortunately that’s a staple of heists. The thieves don’t have experience with explosives, so they contact an explosives expert. Anytime I needed the guys to do something they didn’t have the expertise to do, they called in a favor. Sometimes that resulted in more plot complications; other times it was an indicator of how complex the job was getting. But overall I think the plot moves along nicely.

Building the relationship was a little tricky here, because in a heist story, the plot moves fast and there’s not always room for a lot of character development. So that’s where the sex scenes come in. Each of the scenes progresses the relationship between the two characters, and if things move a little fast, well, a heist is an intense bonding experience.

The book is just over 80,000 words, short for a novel but I think the right length for a heist. The first draft was more like 74,000, and that’s about right for how much I add in revision (books tend to grow by ~10%).

• Setting: Forester Universe, in the Yerba area (analagous to our San Francisco Bay Area). The characters bounce around a lot and I thought it’d be nice to use an area I’m familiar with that I actually haven’t used much in the Forester setting. The gay club Dev takes his teammates out to is in Yerba, and Lee works for the Whalers, but we didn’t really explore the area much. The area, and the divide between classes in it, plays a large role in this story.

• Characters: We have Kris, a 24-year-old mouse who sets the heist in motion in a particularly clumsy way that he thinks is extremely clever. And we have Bryce, the mid-to-late thirties fox who’s been a thief all his life, content with home burglaries until this mouse darts into his life. They’re the main cast, but I had a lot of fun with the side characters, and any one of them could have their own story.

• Plot: A heist! It was fun to write, using some of the genre conventions and playing with others.

I had a lot of fun with this book, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Check it out on the FurPlanet or BadDogBooks site!