Dark Rendezvous - Notes
There is an extremely useful kind of story that, in the interests of precision, I like to label "Told to me as true." I cannot PROVE that the story is true; I merely assert that someone TOLD me it was true.
Told to me as true:
Two editors are sitting at a restaurant table in New York City one day, staring bleakly at one another.
"The Yoda book."
"I know!"
"But--!"
"I know!"
[A long silence, while editors try to imagine a compelling novel about a green sword-wielding gnome who out of grammatical order Life Wisdom dispenses.]
"Who could possibly write a book about YODA?"
[long pause]
[Then, two hearts quicken. Two heads lift. Two pairs of eyes meet, and blaze.]
"SEAN STEWART!"
* * * *
If you have often thought to yourself, "Self — if there's one thing you can say about me, after a careful survey of the life and work, it's that I'd be the perfect person to write a book about Yoda,” then the resulting phone call would have seemed unremarkable to you. Practically inevitable, really.
For me, it was a bit of a surprise.
* * * *
But the idea began to exert a strange fascination for me. Let's be honest, here: I like Yoda. I particularly like the Yoda of The Empire Strikes Back — the crabby, cackling, energetic Yoda.
I liked Star Wars. A lot. I made a lightsaber for myself that summer by lashing a piece of PVC tubing to a flashllight with yards of electrical tape. (I wasn't the only one, either. Come on, you know who you are.)
I liked the idea of writing a straight-up space opera, a swash-buckling story that would be fun – fun to write, fun to read — fun.
So I said, Yes.
* * * *
I was hoping that writing a Star Wars book would be a lark. That proved to be a little optimistic.
First off, I was going to have to write the book very fast, by my standards — four months, more or less, with the last months sharing time with the beginning of the project that would become ilovebees. And yet, there was no doubt that more people were going to read THIS book than had read any of my other novels, so I really really didn't want it to suck.
Secondly, I was surprised to find how seriously I took my responsibility towards Star Wars and its fans. I found I was deathly scared of damaging the... trust? faith? that so many people have invested in that universe. And if there is one character you absolutely can't allow yourself to screw up, it is Yoda.
We are all Luke. We would all like to be Han Solo.
Yoda is only himself, unique.
He is as singular a character as Tom Bombadil (and, though I am the fiercest Tolkien fan on the planet, the Yoda of ESB is a better character than Tom).
* * * *
It is difficult to write a book about a character who tells us that a Jedi must not be ensnared by emotion. Frankly, fiction is all ABOUT being ensnared by emotion. You can't make a beer commercial without that element, let alone a good novel.
And yet, clearly, it's ridiculous to say Yoda doesn't care: caring is practically his essential trait.
The things he cares about most obviously are his students. So a book about Yoda was going to be about students (which is just another way of saying "children.") The ones you hold back and the ones you let go, the ones you protect and the ones you can't save, even from themselves.
So from the beginning, the book was going to be built around some Jedi Padawans. It was probably no surprise to anyone who has read my other books that the defining feature of the young protagonist, Scout, would be the comment, "Ah — the Force is weak in this one."
This book was also going to be about one of Yoda's oldest students, Count Dooku, and the complex web of love and betrayal that had played out between them over the years. (My personal title for the manuscript while I was working on it was The Sith Who Came In From the Cold, with apologies to John Le Carre.)
And because I'm me, and all my books seem to come down to family somehow, it was going to be about the fact that, as Dooku says, "Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without."
* * * *
I actually really like this book. I was afraid I might not, and am so glad that I do.
I hope readers will find that I haven't betrayed their trust.