Star Wars Bookworms Book Club discussion

As I noted in another thread here, for my entire career I have posted "production notes" and FAQs about every comic book, short story, and novel I have done on my farawaypress.com website. Some examples:

KENOBI: http://www.farawaypress.com/fiction/b...

KNIGHT ERRANT: http://www.farawaypress.com/fiction/b...

LOST TRIBE OF THE SITH: http://www.farawaypress.com/fiction/b...

KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC: http://www.farawaypress.com/comics/sw...

I usually wait a while before I post the notes, when it comes to novels, so I can gather up questions people have -- KENOBI I waited something like ten or eleven weeks on. But if people would like to submit some questions in this thread for answering when I write them, I'd be happy to answer some them there. That way everyone gets to see the answers!

Doesn't mean I won't be answering more questions here this month -- this topic just puts some in a place where I am likely to find them again. Thanks!

These are just splendid, very insightful looks into the creative process.

I encourage everyone to leave your questions for JJM. I know I am thinking of some right now and will post them soon.

Can you explain some of the differences between writing EU books vs. the new canon books? Did you find that the team at Lucas was more involved giving you stringent guidelines this time around or was it more of a hands off approach with guidance as needed? I would think that, since this is the first official canon book, there was probably a little bit of a microscope on this project.

Wasn't planning on answering these here at this point -- but the book does indicate that there is significant automation on the computer side, before the screeners see anything. (There's no need to show a physical droid doing the winnowing when it's all in the mainframe.) Zaluna's team only evaluates the relatively very small number of strong-match incidents that are flagged for review. Her firm is a commercial outfit, not (yet) part of the Empire; we can presume the "human element" (or rather, organic) is an artifact of their past practice. And one that's in danger, as the Empire is leaning harder on them: they're losing their latitude to make judgment calls, which worries Zaluna. It's one more thing the Empire is eroding.

As for the other, the simple answer is that not all cams are holocams. Whatever was in the bar was likely installed long ago, pre-Empire -- and Transcept in those days would have only installed the cams to find out what kind of ales people preferred for their commercial clients.

Good questions -- all this is implied, but yes, throwing an extra line in would've covered it!

In your fantastic book "Kenobi" there is a scene in which Kenobi more or less confesses his demons to Anileen. I think its the scene by the fence, he says he failed and because of his mistakes many people died. This scene is just amazing, I had a very hard time not to break a tear reading the pain Obi-wan was burdened by.

But to the point, did you know while writing the book that there was going to be a reebot of the EU? If not, did you have plans to write another Kenobi-book? Why I ask is because he still doesn’t know that Anakin survived with the help of the Emperor. Another book where Kenobi finds out that there is a purge going on in the galaxy with a man called "Lord Vader" in the front, same name the emperor used in the recording he saw at Couroscant would be a great premise and further his remorse and hopefully lead to a deper devotion to his mission. This book does a great job of showing what happen to Obi-wan but there are many years before "A New Hope" and many reveals for him such as this one.

Summation, did you know about the reboot before this project?
Did you have any plans on a potential sequel to explore Obi-wans life.
If you knew about the reboot, would you postpone the book so that it could be set in the new EU.
If you had plans on a sequel, or any promising ideas, have they now been put on indefinite hold because of the reboot and the fact that your book is set in the new "Legends"?

Thanks for a great book, keep em coming!

Regards Richard

The moment when Obi-Wan learned that Anakin was alive as Darth Vader was already shown in DARK LORD: THE RISE OF DARTH VADER.

I was most of the way through writing NEW DAWN when I learned of its introductory role. (There's more about that here: http://www.starwars.com/news/the-jour...). There were no plans for a Kenobi sequel, though I certainly would be interested in writing the character further.

John wrote: "The moment when Obi-Wan learned that Anakin was alive as Darth Vader was already shown in DARK LORD: THE RISE OF DARTH VADER.

I was most of the way through writing NEW DAWN when I learned of its i..."

Thanks for your answer, I am currently on Shadow Hunter so the beginning of the prequel-books so I haven’t read the Dark Lord trilogy yet but I got the books.

A follow up question, if you were to explore Obi-wan more, would it be in legends or a new take on his character from your point of view?

Regards Richard

I honestly don't know -- I would certainly be interested in writing him again, of course, and can imagine a lot of ways to do it. We'll see. If someone had asked me a year ago today if I'd be writing A New Dawn, I wouldn't have known that at that time!

You probably won't see this/get around to answering but I was curious as to if we will be seeing more from Hera and Kanan in novel form as opposed to just through the TV series.