The last day at Origins was a brief one, mostly due to the fact that the convention wraps up a little after mid-day. In all, the whole affair was an enjoyable experience (after I figured out how their bizarre event ticketing system worked). While it seems a little odd to attend a game convention to talk to notable Expanded Universe authors, Origins turned out to be a fantastic place to discuss Star Wars with both notable figures and fans.

But beyond the games and the panels, it was a great chance to hang out with some cool people. I had the chance to chat things up with Tracy and the rest of the Club Jade folks as well Rachael from Galactic Drift. Hanging out with two good friends of mine (and using that as an excuse to see The Avengers for a seventh time) was a blast. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back next year. We’ll see if we can get Shane, Emily, and Nanci up here as well.

But enough rambling. Before heading off to the airport, I sat in on a Q&A with Mike Stackpole. Highlights below the jump!

• First Origins convention Mike attended was in 1979. Two thousand people in attendance, and three of them were women. Demographics have changed quite a bit since then.
• Got into gaming in the 70s with play-by-mail games published by Flying Buffalo. Sold a piece to them for the “princely sum” of $12, one of his first paid gigs. Wound up getting a gig with them after college because he was willing, out of the blue, to go to the ’79 Origins Game Fair with Flying Buffalo.
• Started working full-time freelance in 1987. First novel was Talion: Revenant, but it didn’t see print until 1997.
• Offered to write some Battletech material since he was familiar with the work. The IP owner turned around and said they would love for him to write a trilogy. The time window was extremely narrow, three months to write a 100k novel.
• The gaming industry has a voracious appetite for talent. Lots of room for new and existing authors to be creative. We’re probably going to look back and see that gaming was incredibly important to the development of science fiction from the 70s onwards.
• Military science fiction is on a sustained upswing That subgenre helped people like Zahn, Allston, Anderson, Stackpole establish themselves in the industry.
• The writing world, for many reasons, has parallels to baseball. Gaming is considered the AAA division of the farm system. Then you’ve got publishers as major league teams of various qualities. TOR and Random House/Del Rey-Bantam would be the Yankees and Red Sox. Bane would be the Cleveland Indians.
• Digital publishing is changing the literature world wildly-in favor of the readers and writers at the expense of the traditional publishers. It’s allowing things like anthologies to succeed, since authors can publish them independently of publishers who have no interest in them.
• When Bantam saw how successful Heir to the Empire was, they saw that the contract was a way to promote writers they already had worked with and employed. Mike got a call from Betsy Mitchell on a proposal to novelize a computer game, but he wasn’t sure if there was much of a market in a book there. That changed when Mitchell said it was a license for the X-Wing game. In Mike’s words, “BUY IT.”
• Four months later while he was looking (desperately) for a new book deal, he got an early phone call from his agent offering four Star Wars novels. It goes without saying that he accepted.
• After getting the deal, Mike was at a convention as a guest along with Aaron Allston. It was at this convention that Mike introduced Allston to Star Wars editor Tom Dupree. On the Bantam contract renewal from Lucasfilm, Mike recommended and pushed for Allston to get the X-Wing novels 5-7.
• Convention attendees seemed to all think that Mike had been given a trilogy instead of a four book set, which inspired him to troll the fans and troll them hard. He wrote the series as a trilogy-plus-one. In the third book (Krytos Trap), everything falls apart in the last two pages. Fans didn’t realize there was going to be a fourth book to tie everything up.
• Rogue Squadron rising getting onto the NYT Bestseller List took Bantam completely by surprise. No one on the sales staff expected it. By Bacta War, it only took one week to hit the list, same with Wraith Squadron.
• Writing for Star Wars is a career and life-changing event. Mike was eagerly watching from the sidelines as his buddy Aaron’s life completely changed after getting the Wraith books.
• Mike and Tim Zahn worked closely together in the Bantam days, swapping characters and ideas and coordinating continuity between themselves.
• Lucasfilm is very loyal. Mike was given a hardback in I, Jedi as a reward for his success with the X-Wing novels.
• Mike, Tim, and Aaron were tasked with dealing with inconsistencies in the books and the source material in the final renewal of the Bantam contract. One of the issues was Jan Dodonna, who was said to be dead in a comic strip but alive in later projects. To fix this, Mike put him in Lusankya and freed him just in time for Dark Empire.
• When it comes to licensed IP, you can go one of two ways. There’s the 1960s television take (Sat Trek), where character continuity doesn’t exist but technology continuity does. Or there’s the Lucasfilm continuity take, where everything is canon.
• Tom Dupree came up with the title “I, Jedi.” Both he and Mike knew that if this title leaked and fans found out a first-person Jedi tale wasn’t about Luke Skywalker, there would be a revolt. To prevent this, the codename right until the book went to print was “Blue Harvest.”
• Specter of the Past, I, Jedi, and Vision of the Future form a bit of an ersatz trilogy. The events in I,Jedi influenced a lot of what happened with Luke in the final book of the Hand of Thrawn duology.
• “When it comes to Star Wars, Tim is at the top. You can hope to be his equal, but you’ll never surpass him. I’m a gamer, victory conditions unattainable!”
• “I would have killed Kyp at the end of the Jedi Academy Trilogy.”
• Kyp Durron was overpowered. Mike knew that Corran couldn’t be bigger/stronger/faster than Luke Skywalker. Because of this, he made Corran clever but not the most powerful Jedi ever.
• Working with the Amber series would be a lot of fun. Would be absolutely terrified to write in the Doctor Who and Torchwood universe because there’s so much material there to take into account.
• Would love to write for Batman.
• Mike has a World of Warcraft novel lined up for this year.
• “Writers are entertainers. If writer’s think they’re writing for literary immortality, they’re an idiot.”
• After Mike got the X-Wing contract, Lucy Wilson of Lucasfilm asked if he had ever done comic work. He had always wanted to, but never had the chance. Five months later, Dark Horse called and said they wanted to do some Star Wars comics and LFL insisted that they needed to talk to Mike.