Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
CBR says that among those let go is Dave Land, who has worked on several Lucasfilm properties as editor, including Star Wars Tales, Tag & Bink Are Dead and was in charge of their Indiana Jones line.
He also wrote Infinities: The Empire Strikes Back.
The cuts affected at least two other editors and a sales assistant. There may be another cuts in the sales department. According to The Beat, Dark Horse has over a hundred employees.
We wish Land and his compatriots the best.
Mike Stackpole is back with another blog entry — and information from Random House. Good news: His X-Wing books aren’t out of print after all, and they continue to sell “between 30 and 40 books a week.” Bad news: The publishing industry has some seriously wacky practices. But chances are you already knew that.
I still think it would be nice to see them repackaged as compilations, though.
Interviews Bonnie’s been doing the rounds for her craft book with interviews at Geekdad and TFN. The book also got favorable reviews on TFN, Geekdad, and iGeektrooper.
Meanwhile, Deceived author Paul S. Kemp has appeared on podcasts from SF Signal and (along with John Jackson Miller) the ForceCast’s Jedi Journals.
Tour. DK is sending out some of their authors and artists, along with The Clone Wars’ Ashley Eckstein, on an east coast tour throughout May. Ryder Windham, Chris Reiff, Chris Trevas, and Jason Fry will be making appearances.
This place can get a little rough. Looking for a new forum home now that the ones on StarWars.com are going away? EU Cantina has revamped their boards, and even TFN’s Lit has a welcome thread.
Rancho Obi-Wan. A look inside Steve Sansweet’s library.
The Random House site has come through with a blurb for the July hardcover from Timothy Zahn, Choices of One.
The fate of the Rebellion rests on Luke Skywalker’s next move. But have the rebels entered a safe harbor or a death trap?
Eight months after the Battle of Yavin, the Rebellion is in desperate need of a new base. So when Governor Ferrouz of Candoras Sector proposes an alliance, offering the Rebels sanctuary in return for protection against the alien warlord Nuso Esva, Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie are sent to evaluate the deal.
Mara Jade, the Emperor’s Hand, is also heading for Candoras, along with the five renegade stormtroopers known as the Hand of Judgment. Their mission: to punish Ferrouz’s treason and smash the Rebels for good.
But in this treacherous game of betrayals within betrayals, a wild card is waiting to be played.
The cover, alas, remains. (via)
StarWarsBooks brings us our fourth Timothy Zahn annotation from the 20th anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire:
One of the subtle tricks George used in the Star Wars movies was to show us only a few different planets, but to then use throwaway mentions of others along the way, thus giving us a feel for a much larger galaxy than we were actually seeing. I wanted to continue that technique by throwing in short visits to lots of different worlds such as Bimmisaari.
The new edition will be out in hardcover June 21.
UPDATE 4/12: …And not so much.
Mike Stackpole learned today that Bantam has allowed his X-Wing novels to go out of print. This is a puzzling turn of events to be sure: Though the Star Wars backlist is lengthy, the X-Wing novels have generally been good bets for folks just starting in the EU and are special favorites of many fans.
This does raise questions about the status of Bantam’s other classic EU novels. Are the X-Wing novels alone? (I can think of a few that deserve the ‘honor’ a hell of a lot more.) Is this just a temporary burp? Will they be repackaged as eBooks or in new editions (trade compilations would be nice) to support Aaron Allston’s 2012 Wraith Squadron novel? Let’s hope so.
Lucasfilm’s Leland Chee, the Keeper of the Holocron, has started a new Facebook fanpage in the wake of Monday’s announcement that the StarWars.com forums are not long for this world. You can ask him questions, join a discussion, or find out how this stuff works.
Fear not: If you’re not a fan of the site, you can still bookmark and read the fan page. You will need an account to ask questions or join discussions, though.
Chee has also been on Twitter as @HolocronKeeper for some time now.
It’s looking pretty likely that a nice chunk of the Star Wars backlist will be coming to eBook format this summer. Given the popularity of that post – if not for April Fools, it would probably have been last week’s most-read – it seems there’s quite a bit of interest.
While I know a lot of folks who are all about their Kindles, I can’t say the format has ever held much interest for me. (And I already own most of the Star Wars backlist anyway.) I like physical books, and moreover, I like shopping for actual books in actual bookstores. Ironically, my reason for that – basically, instant gratification, because even two-day shipping takes two days – is the one reason why I can understand the lure of eBooks.
But what are your thoughts? Have you jumped on the eBook train? (Star Wars or otherwise!) Continue reading “Poll/Discussion: Your thoughts on eBooks”
The Force Unleashed II novelization by Sean Williams is a nominee for Best Speculative Original in the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers’ Fifth Annual Scribe Awards. (Shouldn’t it be in the adapted category?)
In his blog entry on the nomination, Williams also says that he’s working on a Star Wars short story – for the Insider, perhaps?
The Scribe Awards have previously nominated one Star Wars novel, Karen Miller’s The Clone Wars: Wild Space for Best Speculative Fiction Adapted (…it wasn’t adapted) in 2009, though the prize ultimately went to the novelization of Hellboy: The Golden Army. They also named Alan Dean Foster, who ghostwrote the original Star Wars novelization, a Grandmaster in 2008. Foster also wrote two Star Wars novels under his own name, 1978’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and 2002’s The Approaching Storm.
Our third look at Timothy Zahn’s annotations for the 20th anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire takes on the Noghri.
Originally, I had had Rukh and his fellows being Sith, keying off Vader’s title of Lord of the Sith. Since at that point the term hadn’t been defined, I figured I was safe. But Lucasfilm was concerned that George would want to use the Sith at some future date (which, as we all know, he did) and told me to pick som…e other term for them.