Well, I am a stranger, really. I'm a total newbie. I've only been in print for just over two years (March 2004, when my first novel, City of Pearl, came out), and Bloodlines is my third Star Wars novel. I've just written a lot in a very short time.
I was asked if I wanted to write Star Wars completely out of the blue in late 2003. I didn't even know what a tie-in entailed, in fact. Del Rey and Lucasfilm had seen advance copies of my book -- City of Pearl wasn't even published when they approached me -- and said they thought I'd fit in okay. Then I got the call in late February 2004 to do the first Republic Commando novel.
I knew absolutely nothing about the universe, too, although I'd seen the movies, and I think coming to it stone cold gave me a different take on it. I had no preconceived notions, and I wasn't raised on it. I fell in love with Star Wars' complexity and its gray areas, which are perfect for a writer like me. I'm a journalist by background, so I take a neutral stance and just report what I see: I hate guiding readers and telling them what to think and who to like and dislike. I just want to show them what's there and let them make up their own minds, which is something Star Warsenables very easily.
You seem to have a special affinity for the character of Boba Fett.
He's a gift if you love writing flawed characters. I don't write heroes or villains -- I can't see people that clearly differentiated -- and Boba has so many flaws woven in with his brilliance that I could unpick his psychological profile for weeks and still not get bored.
The man is both a mess and an inspiration. He's had the childhood from hell. No mother figure, and don't tell me Taun We is any substitute: a cloistered existence: a father who, frankly, has a lot of strange emotional baggage himself: and then he sees Dad, the center of his life and his sole focus, killed in front of him. Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud please pick up...and yet he still wins. He doesn't just survive, he excels. He's seen as a villain, but he has an unshakeable sense of honor and a rigid moral code. And he's defined wholly by one thing: his relationship with his father, cut short before its time. Even his desire to excel as a bounty hunter is, I'm convinced, a legacy of his need to please his father and live up to his expectations.
So that makes a 70-plus-year-old Boba a fascinating character to write. He worships Jango as the perfect example of fatherhood, and yet he's abandoned his own wife and child -- because no human with his upbringing could ever really relate well to others, especially women. He's made a fortune (more than once) but has no real use for it. He's used to being the best in the galaxy at a very physical profession, but mortality and age are creeping up on him. How does he handle that? How does he come to terms with the legacy he'll leave behind, such as it is?
The secondary fascination is how he handles the role of Mandalore. I've done a lot of work on Mandalorians, and even developed the culture and a working language for LFL, and the variety of styles of leadership over the centuries is striking. But Boba doesn't speak Mandalorian (I stuck with the literal continuity there), and he's still a working bounty hunter while in office, so to speak. That tells you not only a great deal about him, but also about the Mandalorians themselves.
It's a fiction goldmine for me. I never tire of Boba or the Mandalorians.
