Confessions: What I’ve Always Really Wanted to Write
I have a confession to make.
I’ve always wanted to write a Star Wars novel.
Not in a “writing drafts in my basement” kind of way, which would be creepy. But everyone has authorial daydreams of one sort or another and if — somehow, someday — I happened to be doing decently well for myself writing pulp books of one kind or another, the ultimate fulfillment of the daydream would be getting tapped for a Star Wars book.
The dream has lost some of its shine since my very early days of wanting to be a writer (which as near as I can peg them started around fourth or fifth grade). What’s referred to as the “Expanded Universe” of Star Wars, i.e. everything beyond the core movies, has gotten a lot more expanded.
At the time when I stopped reading new Star Wars novels as they came out, the timeline novelists had to work in ranged from very shortly before the first movie to about fifteen years after the last one. Some YA books played around a little later than that with the children of Han Solo and Princess Leia (twins, if you were wondering), but mostly the novels all followed the pretty predictable arc of Rebel vs. Imperial forces as the leaderless Empire falls reluctantly apart.
That was then and this is now.
Starting in 1999 the Star Wars novels took a turn for the unrecognizable, at least for people only familiar with the movies. An alien race from outside the Star Wars galaxy invades, to no good effect on the already-campy canon at all.
Riiiiight about here is where things turn shitty.
Novels about the prequels and the years before them also started appearing, and I’ve always privately wondered if there wasn’t some behind-the-scenes jockeying involved to at least get those, rather than having to write the alien-invasion stories. But who knows.
End result is there’s not much unclaimed space in the Star Wars timeline. We may even be heading for a reboot soon, though probably not until George Lucas dies. So I’m not sure there’d be a Star Wars novel left for me to write even if I did somehow get to a position in the industry where it was offered.
But it’s kinda fun to carry that embarrassing little adolescent dream with me in my career. There are worse things to want as a young writer, all in all.
It’s like you’re living my life. I had this same dream.
Also, “Vector Prime” is where I pulled up short. Because (without spoilers), effing really, Salvatore?? REALLY?
At the risk of spoiling Vector Prime for the three people left in the world who might care, the much-maligned character death in it apparently wasn’t Salvatore’s original idea. The editors asked Lucas if they could kill someone from the movies and got a list back of who was fair game and who wasn’t.
Probably a good publishing decision, on the whole. It focused almost all the criticism on one specific scene, neatly distracting from the fact that the novel as a whole and the plotline it launched were utter crap.
Wikipedia has a bit on it, though thinly-sourced, so take it with a grain of salt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Prime#Death_of_Chewbacca
I forgave Salvatore long ago, but I am happy to discover at least there was a vetting process and that it wasn’t his decision. Thanks!
T’was a sad sad day for me.