Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. This is James Alducher, and I'm really excited to be here with Jim Loosino. Jim, how are you doing? I'm doing fine. How are you doing? Good. You know, Jim, I bet you most people don't know who you are, and yet you've had an amazingly successful writing career. Altogether, how many novels have you written? I I counted at least 30. Yeah, probably in the I I measure them by the foot, actually, so a couple of feet worse. And then and You know, a lot a lot of those were, you know, adaptations of, of different projects like the Robotech books or 22 books that, my friend and I adapted. So, not all of them are what you might call original novels. Yeah. But that's okay. I think, you know, every novelist comes to the career from a different point, you know, from a different area of their life. And so you came at it through through that area. But how many Yeah. How many Star Wars related novels? Like, novels that weren't adaptations but were, like, in the Star Wars universe? Did you I counted about 12 of those. No. I think it's closer to 9, but I've also done a couple of, what in Star Wars, franchise are called nonfiction Star Wars. Like for DK Publishing, I did sort of an inside the world of Star Wars, and I did a, a book related to Revenge of the Sith, that just, gave background material that weren't that weren't actually novels. You you you joke, but Star Wars is a true movie. Right? It's basically a galaxy a long time ago. Yeah. I mean, it there's not a day passes when there aren't references to Star Wars somewhere. I mean, it must be the most culturally like like, my entire generation has been and probably before and after several generations has been affected by Star Wars, and the fact that there's gonna be a new one released next year means this is just gonna continue for decades. Yeah. I mean every every night on Jon Stewart, he he cracks some Star Wars related reference. And I mean, I think there's actually, a nonfiction, book that's been published recently that deals with the phenomenon of Star Wars, how it's sort of infiltrated so many aspects of, contemporary culture. Well, it's funny because I'll even tell you in the context of and and I I wanna get to your the beginnings of your writing career and your personal story and how it came up, but I'll tell you just a little story. When I had a business that was falling apart at one point, I bought a bunch of books related to the Tao of Star Wars and I swear to God, I followed, like, the the principles of the force and my business survived as as stupid as that sounds. No. It doesn't sound stupid to me at all because I I I think that that's part of the reason why this franchise has been so successful because, there are there are real guiding principles, you know, down deep buried inside of it. Yeah. I mean and George Lucas, I mean, he looked at everything from Joseph Campbell to the Tao to Buddhism, everything to kind of build up the principles of Star Wars and the Force and the arc of the hero and so on. Yes. Absolutely true. So so so, Jim, you started off, if I'm not mistaken, as a carpenter. Is that correct? I went well, I went through a lot of the usual, job descriptions. I've worked as a psychiatric aide. I was a rock musician on tour with various bands back in the late '60s early '70s. I sort of segued into carpentry to finance a lot of travel that I did in my 20s. I spent about 10 years traveling around the world and would just bounce back into the United States and do carpentry or painting for a while. We came to, gather enough money to finance another excursion. And then, you were even at one point an astrologer. I I was. I never took money for it, but I I became fascinated by astrology and used to do charts for, for my friends and for their, their newborn kids and I had fun with it. Not that I put any real stock in it, but it was, an interesting pursuit. When when did you well, when did you decide, okay, now I'm gonna try my I've done everything else. Now I'm gonna try my hands at writing a novel and see where it takes me. It really the writing came out of the the travel. I started to keep pretty extensive travel journals. I just was fascinated by the people that I would encounter on the road. I was, of course, you know, taken with all the places that I stumbled into or onto and a couple of my close friends were actually pursuing writing careers and over the years I thought, well maybe there's a story in some of the adventures that I've either heard about or had. And, in the late seventies, I turned my hand to it and was lucky enough to have my first novel published in 1980. I mean, a couple of comments there. 1st, you you say some of your friends were starting careers. I think a lot of people think that they're in they're gonna be in their cubicle in the office and they're gonna write their novel and suddenly they're gonna be big and famous and rich. But a writing career is a career. It takes years years years and persistence to build up, you know, a repertoire of books and, and so and to actually be known and to make money. Like, did you make money on your first book? I mean, I, you know, I I garnered all the usual, you know, rejection slips and, you know, revised that first novel probably, 10 times over the course of 2 years before it was finally purchased by Ballantine Books. You do have to really work at it, and sometimes hard work isn't even enough. I know some very, very talented writers whose, novels have not been able to be marketed. Why is that you think? Well, I think that the problem is that a lot of it is market driven, and if you write a book that can't be easily categorized or a publisher thinks is not going to, attract a wide audience, the publisher is just not going to to risk, buying it and spending all the money it takes to promote it. I think it's it's much more difficult now than it was when I was coming up in the late seventies, early eighties. Now, everyone is in search of an instant bestseller, and it's very difficult for first time writers to break in. Fortunately, there is a lot of epublishing now and a lot of great stuff on the Internet, so at least people have an outlet. Why do you think people feel now so entitled to have, like, a bestseller on their first book? I, you know, I think that that spans that's not only confined to writing. I I think that, you know, people wanna succeed out of the box right now. I don't know why. I don't know why. There's the the idea of apprenticeship has sort of been pushed aside and, you know, people wanna find the immediate, terrific job or, the one that's going to pay the most money or they're gonna succeed in their first film. Their first the first song that they write is going to, you know, break all box office records or whatever. So I I I think it's I don't know what it is. I think it's somewhat generational, but I have no real explanation for it. You know, and I think what was very fortunate for you is that your books were able to piggyback on top of these enormous marketing platforms, like, let's say, Robotech or Star Wars or whatever. And so you you had the benefit of that whole infrastructure, 1,000,000,000 of dollars' worth of infrastructure behind you. Yeah. I mean, that that's, and for some writers, that's a hard choice. I mean, I I think that there's a lot of writers who consider themselves serious writers and I'll put that in quotes, who are sort of disparaging of people who work for hire, who decide to go into franchise. I mean, I wrote probably a dozen novels of my own before I finally sort of entered the world of Robotech. That was the first time that I had done any adaptation work. But when I found it, I sort of had some kind of strange skill set that worked for these large universes, I just stuck with it, and that's what happened with Star Wars when Star Wars came up. You know, I've I've been writing Star Wars for more than 12 years now. Yeah, and, it's not like so I've read some of these novels, and I've I've just been reading, Darth Plagueis, which came out in 2012. You have the the book I'm gonna mention in a in a in another intro. You have Tarkin, coming out November 4th about Grand Moff Tarkin. But I I noticed in in Darth Plagueis, this is a very literary book actually. It's not even though it's within using the characters of of Star Wars, you could see your own imprint on it and you're making a lot of decisions that I'm assuming are your own and not necessarily dictated to you by some Star Wars bible that you have to follow. No. In in fact, there's been very little, dictating at all. I've been some novels, have been pitched to me, some ideas have been pitched to me, and some novels I've brought to the table in the Star Wars franchise, but I've had free rein to write the novels in the way I see fit. So, I I am trying to to write adult Star Wars, so I don't I don't try and tailor my language or the plots to any particular age group. I I'm you know, I know that the readership is broad. You know, I get letters from 10 year olds, and I get letters from 60 year olds. So I just write novels the way I would in any piece of fiction that I worked on. Well, you know, I notice it it's these are not easy to read novels in the sense that there might be you might mention 50 planets, you know, hundreds of characters, you know, all the characteristics of, you know, dozens of different species, and then we're kind of crisscrossing lots of different plot lines. And it does remind me of and I I saw in an interview, you mentioned one of your your influences is Thomas Pynchon. It does remind me of that almost dense style where, you know, you're dealing with a galaxy here. So galaxies aren't simple, Just like he would deal with these enormously dense complicated plots, the actual style of the writing has to be equally, you know, dense and kind of, you know, complicated. And that's what's happening in your books, I I notice. I try I've tried to make, a galaxy far, far away as as real as possible. I have been criticized for using, too many references. Those books are very difficult to get into. In fact, if you're not a Star Wars guy, I've had a lot of friends say, I tried to read your book and I gave up after the second page. Does that suck when someone says that? No, because I totally get it because, you know, these these books are set in a completely in an alternate universe and if you haven't, there's no easy entry point, So, now 20 years of publishing, you've got to come to these books with a little bit of knowledge of the universe. We're all trying to make an attempt now to simplify it a bit to make it to make these books and some of these side projects a little bit more accessible to new readers, but there's a really hardcore fan base that will call me on every mistake. So, I've gotta be very careful and and I try to write, I try to I try to write a little bit to that fan base. I want the ones who've who've been loyal readers to really, get the most that they can out of the books. Well, because life itself is complicated, and you're dealing with all these issues of not only this mystical power of the the force, but kind of empire politics and economics and, you know, the relationships between different species. There's really very very few ways I could imagine that you simplify it without it becoming childlike. Yeah. Definitely don't want to make it childlike. But it but it is interesting to me that, you know, you you look back at A New Hope, back in 1977, which was kind of a pulp science fiction adventure and just where this franchise has come since then. So many things were hinted at in the the those first three films that it enabled, you know, we writers and other people have contributed to just continue to flesh out this universe and make it a almost a living thing. Well, it's interesting. Someone once explained to me there's there's 2 types of paintings. There's one like there's paintings like the Mona Lisa where everything is within everything you need to know is within the picture. And then there's other paintings where there's things going off. You know there's things happening outside of the frame of the picture. And Star Wars is definitely like that where so many things there are so many back stories and forward stories. It it gives you almost infinite material to write novels around it. It's really true. I mean, there's so many lines and even in that first film that that make you wonder what what is the Kessel Run and what are these Karelian ships and just all all the all the throwaway lines, open up all kinds of speculations. So I really think that Lucas was masterful in creating that film the way he did. He had all this backstory, but he sort of trimmed it away to give us the adventure, but hinted that it's taking place in an enormous enormous sphere. Well and and one of the most critical back stories you deal with in your next novel, Tarkin. But first, I wanna ask you, when you're writing these books, are you just kind of do do you just sort of sit down and write and you're making stuff up? Or do you have kind of this huge whiteboard where you have post it notes and everything to kinda keep track of all the things you're gonna write about? It's actually a little bit of both. I mean, I spend a lot of time just kind of daydreaming the story, just thinking through where I want to go, then there's kind of an intermediate phase where I begin to do research, not only looking at previous novels or looking at the vast amount of material that's already been created for the franchise, but also real world people, places, whatever that I think that I can draw from. And then I, I've gotten in the habit of just walking around with the story. I don't I don't really sit down and write a word until I can until I know the story backwards and forwards. I can tell it to myself. I can hear all the dialogue. I feel like I know the characters, and then I'll actually sit in front of the word processor and get going. So there might be months where you're not writing at all. You're just thinking and researching. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Do do you feel, though, that several month break reduces your writing skills, like you have to get back into it a little bit? Every it's funny. I mean, even after all these years, every book is like the first book. There's always that period in the first couple of weeks of writing where I'm going, I don't know how to do this, I can't remember how to do this, but that's where the sweat comes into it. You just have to stick with it and and break through that initial period of uncertainty, and then you remember, oh, yeah. I know that chord. I remember how to do that. So it gets, gets easier and easier once you get into it. And then and then do you write every day after that? Like, do you have kind of a goal for yourself, a 1,000 words a day or 10 pages a day? No. I'm not I'm not that much of a stickler, but I am a kind of monomaniac when I get into when I get into a book. I mean, it's it's with me like a low grade fever. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I'm sort of in the book. I write in the afternoon. I don't wake up and jump right into it. I get my day going with other things and then I'll usually devote the afternoon to writing. And if I do a 1,000 words that I'm content with, that's fine. If it's a great day and I turn out 4,000 words, that's a blessing. So I but I just stick with it. The thing about writing these books is I don't have I usually don't have a long time to sit with them which I lament really. Like with Dark Plages, because of the way that book developed and all sorts of different events that surround it, I had several years to spend with that book. Right, because first they canceled it. Yeah, and that's a whole side story that, you know, we can talk about, but generally, I have about a year to I've got to think through, I've got to meet with people at Lucasfilm, we discuss certain aspects of the story, then I've got to sit down and create great the story. It has to be submitted in outline form to Lucasfilm, so we all are literally on the same page about where the story is going. And, then I do my little daydreaming and research, and then I write furiously to to meet a deadline. And then And it's really not for everybody. You've really got to, a deadline thing is not for every writer. And then every step of the way, are they trying to say, okay. This fits within the Star Wars universe, or this doesn't fit within the Star Wars universe, so you can't say that? No. Not at all. Generally generally speaking, you know, once, once we've talked about the project, then it's up to me to create an outline and once that outline has been looked at and accepted, then I'm on my own. They don't come back and I mean, there is a little bit of editing that goes on after the manuscript is submitted. There may be things that they want me to change. There may be things they want maybe additional scenes or to include a character that I hadn't I hadn't thought about. But really, there's been there's very little in the way of, I don't know, intervention of that sort. Well, there's so many things I wanna kind of, like, you you keep giving me things I wanna veer off to, but I wanna reel it back a little bit. You mentioned you went to, that first episode of Star Wars in 1977, A New Hope with a friend of yours. The fur it was the first Star Wars movie. The friend was Brian Daly, correct, who who wrote many of the original post Star Wars novels about Han Solo? That's right. Brian and I were were very close friends. He's one of the he's one of the people that I sort of sort of referenced when I said friends were working on novels, because Brian was working on his first fantasy novel at that point. We knew very little about Star Wars going in, but we just were both just blown away by what we experienced. And ironically, Brian would go on to be the person who really did the first high end novels. He wrote 3 Han Solo novels back in the, late seventies. Did you guy could you guys have imagined movie, Red. Oh, could you guys have imagined when you went to that first Star Wars, movie that you would be so involved in the Star Wars universe in the decades to come? Well, I never gave it a thought because at that point in my writing, I was writing mass market. I wasn't even a I wasn't a science fiction writer, and I had no interest in writing science fiction. But Brian, just a hardcore comic book fan, just read had read every science fiction novel from when he was 9 years old, I mean he's just totally involved in it. It was a dream come true for him and it was very interesting for me to act as kind of a sounding board for his ideas when he was writing the Han Solo trilogy, because it sort of kept me very close to Star Wars and also was very instructive in terms of seeing how Brian worked as a writer. It's it was very interesting. I mean, I knew that, Darth Vader was Luke's father long before most people did because Brian was told that. It's really interesting. Imagine me as I remember literally, I think it was 7th or 8th grade, when Darth Vader reveals he's Luke's father, and I'm thinking to myself first, I was thinking to myself, oh my god. And then I'm thinking to myself the worst feeling, which is that now I'm gonna have to wait years to find out what happens next. That was just horrible. That's right. It but that's the brilliance. Right? That's before you could just, you know, marathon watch every episode of a TV show or anything like that, you had to wait. I feel like George Lucas was cruel to, like, millions of 13 year olds who just needed to know. So so Yeah. But, you know, he never knew whether you know, he he was as shocked as anybody that the first film succeeded in the way he did. It could've been a one off, you know, but it just, he hit the right notes and it was all gold from then on. So let's say so so, again, so many different questions. Like, right now, the next Star Wars movie is coming out in, I guess 2015. They're already starting to to shoot it. They've already been planning out the sets and the actors and so on. I assume the movie is either written or or mostly written. How is this going to affect kind of the, continuity of the post Star Wars universe, a lot of which you either oversaw or wrote with the new Jedi order? Like, from what I understand in this next movie, Luke Skywalker comes back after a 30 year disappearance, but you have him in the new Jedi Order all around there 20 years later, 26 years later. Right. Well, first of all, I know nothing about the, the new movie. Damn. I I I have high hopes for it. You know, I think that, we're left with the same sort of situation that, fans of Star Trek are left for, with one with one difference. The new the new Star Trek movies, are literally an alternate universe, so they can go where they want without being in real conflict with the existing continuity. So with Star Wars, I think it's just gonna have to have the same sort of mindset that there are, 2 2 parallel universes here. And, you know, it's up to it's up to the fans, I think, to decide how they're gonna work through that. I I try not to think too much because I give myself a headache. You know, the good thing is a lot of the prequel stuff probably will still last in that they're probably not going to touch that, although who knows in the future. But there's so many opportunities for for spin off movies for them anyway, you know, once they get started. Yeah. I think there's there's gonna be a ton of opportunities, and, you know, I'm I'm really eager to see what, JJ Abrams and his and his crew, are gonna come up with because undoubtedly, there's going to be a ton of material that can be, spun off into novels and other projects just just based on this new trilogy. And they don't call you at all for, hey, what should we what should we do about these new where do the new Jedi knights come from? They don't like they don't ask you for advice? I wish. I wish. You know, it's it's interesting because there's a real there's sort of, the novelists on one side and then the movie and TV people on the other side, and there's no crossover. I don't know of any novelists that have done any scripting for even like the Clone Wars TV show or the upcoming Rebels or the present Rebels, you know, and the and the movie the movies are being done by, you know, very, very highly respected screenwriters. So I know they don't call me. So so let's say someone's a new aspiring writer and they love Star Wars and they wanna get into it. How would they start writing their own Star Wars novels? You know, do they have to get permission? Do they have to outline stuff? Like, how does somebody get into this now the way you're into it? Well, every, writer that's been selected for the franchise has something of a track record, you know, published novels of their own. You know, this is a licensed property, so you either have to write fan fiction, you know, which you can publish online, there's plenty of sites for that, but to work in the franchise, you've got to have some novels under your belt. You've got to have a track record of some sort and then I guess you could appeal to your agent just, you know, to make it to, get your agent to let the people at Lucasfilm know that you'd be interested, or the people at Delray know that you're interested in writing. But a lot of the writers have have been chosen, you know, rather than, come come to Star Wars. So they've been they've been kind of handpicked by Del Rey and Lucasfilm. Interesting. So how many novels had you written before you realized, hey, I can maybe make a living at this. This is this is gonna be good for me. You mean outside of Star Wars? Just, a second. Right? Well, the first, that first novel back in 1980, I got a small advance and I knew that I was gonna have to keep doing carpentry if I was going you know, I wasn't gonna be able to subsist on what I was gonna make as a writer. Things changed for me in, the early eighties, or I guess in the mid eighties when there was a there was a television, animated TV show on called, Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. And Brian, my friend Brian Daly, was, intimately involved with the series and was writing scripts for it, and he convinced me to to submit a script for the show. And that script was purchased, and then, I went on to write 7 scripts for the show, and it was a it was a nice payday. And right up the heels of that, because Brian and I had worked closely together on Galaxy Rangers, came Robotech, and the notion of adapting this then very popular anime into a series of novels. So that kept me busy for the next couple of years without having to go back to carpentry, and from then on, it was just I was able to survive as a writer. I read my own works and then, you know, 2000 and 2000 came along, Star War I got into Star Wars and it's been good ever since. You know, it it shows the importance of 2 things. 1 is, you know, there's this saying, you're the average of the 5 people you keep closest around you. So, clearly, you and Brian Daly were supporting each other in in, you know, kind of in career wise and helping each other. And this is this is a critical thing. Like, you you can't you can't do it on your own. You everybody needs kind of a scene to grow up in. Like, you see with the the beatniks, for instance, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burrows, they they sort of grew up together, and you and Brian Daly sort of grew up in fantasy and science fiction together. Yeah. I absolutely believe that. I I really believe that, you know, if you are lucky enough to fall into a, you know, a crew of like minded people that you have a much greater chance. I've seen it in music. I've certainly seen it in writing. I've seen it in among, painters, artists that I know. This is very important because you do you have that support network. I mean, even fledgling, comics, you know, stand up comics talk about this. So, it's really important to be with a like minded group. Sure. Otherwise, you're just you're an outlier, you know, you're out there on your own and you're struggling with with no feedback, with no sense of how to go about doing these things and, you know, then there's always, you know, connections that occur. You know, it's interesting. There's there's a brand new book by Walter Isaacson called The Innovators and it's about essentially the history of computers and computing. And he makes a very clear distinction between the guys who all worked together to create the first computer and then guys who were off in Iowa trying to create a computer, but they didn't have their scene or their people to work with. And had they had very different results and it was the people who worked as a group and even gave each other credit, that that rose up the highest. Yeah. That's that's absolutely true. I've never participated in any writers groups. They probably serve a similar function, although it's not like you're among your friends and watching your friends either succeed or fail and supporting each other. There, it's more critical analysis of your work and things of that nature, more sort of academic. But I I do believe that, you know, if you're gonna pursue any any art or, you know, even computer computer science or anything like that, that being among the right group of people is gonna be beneficial. You know, and then the other thing you brought up essentially, without bringing it up, is persistence. Like you said, after your first novel and your first advance, you had to get back to carpentry, and maybe that happened after the second novel or the third novel. But, you know, not many people write 5 novels or 10 novels before they say, oh, okay. This is the way I'm gonna go. Like, what kept you persistent other than, of course, a love for it? I think that's exactly that's it really. It was just a passion, you know, a desire to to tell stories. I mean, I I grew up loving books, loving, you know, movies and all sorts of, adventurous stories and and wanted to be able to contribute in any way that I could. But you do need persistence. I just read this great, biographical piece on Elmore Leonard, You know, and he and he's he's another example of someone who just stuck with it. He was working in advertising, and he was writing these westerns. And, you know, not making a lot of money, but he loved doing it, and then eventually turned to these, you know, these great crime caper books that have, you know, turned him into an icon. Yeah. He's considered maybe the best years before he succeeded. Yeah. He's maybe now considered the best crime novelist ever. He I've he is for my for my money. You know, so so I wanna geek out a little bit and talk about your your next book, which is about which is called Tarkin. And it's about grandma Tarkin. And I and if as long as, you know so just to remind people, he's the guy who was kind of commandeering the construction of the Death Star in the very first movie, Star Wars. And he basically dies when Luke Skywalker, you know, comes out of nowhere from Darth Vader's point of view and destroys the Death Star. So what made you decide to take this character and make a novel out of him? Well, he grew more interesting to me as the other when the other film when the films that followed came out because in the first film, you know that Vader was a powerful force, but you don't really understand just how powerful Vader is until you get into Empire Strikes Back and the 3rd film. But and so, here's Tarkin in the first movie who literally seems to be the one holding Vader's leash. And, I kept thinking how who is this guy that he has command of the Empire's most powerful weapon? And he's not he's not intimidated at all by the dark lord of the Sith. So when the chance came to explore his character, you know, I I jumped at it. Well, you know, you know, it to me and to maybe many Star Wars fans, I don't know, to me, it almost seemed like a later contradiction or mistake. When you realize how important and powerful Darth Vader is, why what like, it almost seems like they made a mistake in Star Wars by having this this kind of cute, normal guy, Tarkin. You know, he's the one who tells Vader to stop when Vader's, you know, choking one of the guys over there. So so so, like, you think later on, well, why why did that guy have that power? Was that a mistake? That's what that's what target that's what the novel explores. Do you think novel really explores their their early relationship So so and how it is that they seem to be on parody. So so it it seems like what you're doing with the novel is you're almost kind of, stitching up the mistake. But do you think George Lucas initially made a mistake by having Tarkin almost have more power than than Vader in the beginning there? Well, I don't think he had, necessarily more power. You know? I mean, we we didn't really know, and I'm not sure George Lucas even knew, how how the Empire actually functioned. You know, I think that those those first three movies were very organic in the sense that, you know, George had a lot of stuff planned, but if he if he came upon a better idea, what he thought was a better idea, he changed what he had. So I think that, The whole brother sister thing, for instance. Yeah. Yeah. When you read the early scripts, you see that he did it. He he, monkeyed with things all the time. He changed things as he went along. I think there were things that he discovered in the second movie. I mean, if he had the time to go back and change something in the first, he might have. But they were an ongoing process. So, I didn't really I don't think it was a contradiction to have Tarkin seem the leader of the 2 of them. I felt that they were sort of on the same ground, but they had different job descriptions as it were. Right. Interesting. Vader was kind of the Empire's terror weapon, and Tarkin was the commander of this massive battle fortress. Right. And it was, and so you explore in this next book kind of his rise to power. And you you briefly mentioned, I guess, his his uncle or or somebody related to him in Darth Plagueis, your your last book or your second to last book, and Tarkin's kind of descended from that guy. So we start to get hints of where he's coming from in terms of the aristocracy of the of the Empire. Yeah. This I mean, you could you could read, Tarkin as kind of an origins, story, because I do go back, into Tarkin, actually all the way back to his childhood to to sort of give a sense of how he came to be this kind of monster in the empire. He is he seems like an aristocrat, but actually, he's a bit of a he comes from a kind of a backwater planet. So, he's got a very, I think, a very interesting, tale. Now, do you plan any other novels outside the Star Wars universe? Or or do you think the new movies are gonna open up a whole new new bunch of novels for you? I'm I'm sort of I'm on a kind of, wait wait and see. I mean, I'm in sort of a wait and see phase on that. I I really don't know. I don't there's, you know, I don't have anything planned. I haven't been commissioned to write anything. I think we're all waiting to see at this point exactly where things go. Well, now now now that Disney owns things, do you think that there's kind of different channels you're gonna have to go through or, you know, maybe they're not gonna do outside novels? I don't think that that's gonna be the case. I think that, Disney is, is eager to pursue this. They realize that there's a nice large fan base out there, who who, who really enjoy reading these stories that extend the reach of the films. So I think they're going to be interested in writing, you know, in publishing novels and keeping this going. We just don't know yet because, you know, there isn't a lot of information about the new movies, and, so we don't even have a sense of, you know, which characters can be spun off into their own series or anything like that. And, you know, it would be interesting to see a movie or a novel just about the young Yoda. And I know there's been some mention of him in various I don't know if there's ever been one novel about just Yoda, but maybe I'm wrong. There there is a novel called Dark Rendezvous, which was set during the Clone Wars. That's probably the closest someone will come to be able to read a book focused on Yoda. And I know that there's going to be these there are going to be movies that are going to be in between, released in between the movies of the new trilogy. Oh, really? I heard so often what yeah. And I I did hear something that one of them could be about Yoda. Wow. So they're gonna go way into the past and do kind of, like, an in between movie. I mean, that's very interesting. Well, but, you know, they might. I mean, you know, there are all these again, there are all these characters that are that are sort of right for exploration like Boba Fett and and Yoda and even Count Dooku. I mean, there's so many places they could go. Young Han Solo? Yeah. Sort of like young Indiana Jones. Right. Right. So so and, again, this is kind of a a geeking out sort of question. But what actually is the difference between the dark side of the force and the light side of the force? And you you start to explain it very well in in I wish that, you know, George Lucas could, you know, be the 3rd party in this conversation to really, really, tell us the truth. I mean, I think it has to what what George has said is that the difference between the two is that the white side of the force, for lack of a better term, is about compassion. So, this is one of the reasons why a dark lord could never survive death in the way that character that some of the Jedi do. Yoda, Obi Wan, even Anakin, because there was, this bit of compassion in all of them. But then, you know, in in Darth, Plagueis, you mentioned also, they're trying to explain, you know, the Sith Lords are trying to explain the differences and that you suggest that the light side is more about kind of submission to the flow of the force, almost like a a Taoist sort of approach, whereas the Sith Lords are are trying to enhance their abilities to control this universal power. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it it is very doused in that sense. You know, feeling the force and and being in tune with the force is the light side. Trying to manipulate the force, for your own for your own ends, will take you to the dark side. And what do you think like, why do you think George Lucas sold the franchise to Disney? I I mean, I know it was a lot of money, but it was about $4,000,000,000 which I'm just assuming the very next movie is gonna bring in $4,000,000,000. So he it's sort of like he gave up on a lot of upside here. Yeah. I don't I don't really know. I mean, it seems like he I think it was I think something like this is so all encompassing that it's hard to, I don't think he I think he felt perhaps that he couldn't move on unless he did this. There are other things there are many other things that George Lucas is interested in pursuing. And he kind of like The Godfather kept getting dragged back into Star Wars with Clone Wars and with Rebels and everything else, and I think maybe some of it was just I need to just divorce myself from this so that I can attend to some other of my interests. I mean, I'm just totally speculating. I I have no idea what, you know, why he did it. I mean, you know, the other possibility is he just got sick of all the criticism that, was swirling around the prequels, you know, which not everybody appreciated. You know, I like the prequels, actually. Like, I I'm a fan of the prequels because I I think it got much more into the Force aspects. Yeah. I I like them too. But, you know, a lot of a lot it was a lot of criticism, you know, all that stuff swirling around, you know, Jar Jar Binks and the rest of it. But but I really don't think that it was that he was, you know, forced out because, you know, of criticism. I think that he just wanted to move on to other things in his life. Now, the one area where I've seen you critical of the prequels is in the midi chloridians or however you pronounce it as being kind of these cellular organisms that determine how much force power someone has. But I think you kind of, in your novels, kind of explain it away in a good way that they're they're just kind of translating the force as opposed to being the source of the force. Yeah. There's sort of, the way I I like to think of them is there's sort of these envoies to the force. The more midichlorians that one has, the more, easily it is for someone to access the force. They're like angels to God or something like that. But I mean, the problem that a lot of fans have with this idea is it's just sort of the idea of midichlorians steals a little bit of the magic away from the Force. It makes it there's too much sort of science all of a sudden as an underpinning for the Force. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that Star Wars fans really don't wanna know, that they really wanna leave mysterious. I was just reading before we, for our phone call here, I was reading about all the the jokes that are circulating about the revelation of of Palpatine's first name, which which happens in Tarkin. Yeah. He's like Sheev. Right? Yes. Yes. And, you know, so some things you have to wonder. Well, maybe maybe that should have been kept as a secret, but, you know, my first impression when I when I heard that name was that's really a curious choice. It was a curious choice on George's part, and that certainly he had that name for a long time, and it wasn't that he wasn't going to reveal it. In fact, there was, a live action television show in which that name that would have been revealed. But the more I started to look at the name, the more I realized, well, this is George just playing a little bit on Sanskrit and Palpatine coming from Nabu, a lot of the names there sort of have a Sanskrit or Hindi, origin, even Padme. So the, I started to warm to it. I don't have I don't have a problem with it that a lot of people think you'd be having. Yeah. It's interesting because it's I guess you could say it's related to Shiva, the god of destruction in in Hindu. Yeah. I it there's there's that. There's, you know, there's also the idea of it's very close to sheave, s h e a v e, which means sort of to gather together or collect in one place. There's also the closeness to sheave, a prison weapon. So I think it can work, on a lot of levels. I think it'll just take time for the hardcore fans to kind of get used to the fact that it is now canon. Well, so so, Jim, Tarkin is coming out November 4th. I'm assuming they're gonna have a great marketing plan for it. I'm really looking forward to reading it. I've been enjoying all of your other books. I hope you keep writing Star Wars novels even after the the new movies come out. Well, that's very kind of you, James. I really appreciate it. Yeah. And I and I appreciate you coming on this call. It's like, when it's for me, like you said, you went to this Star Wars and it it you you went with your friend and it blew you guys away. And now here you are, you know, you've written so much. It's been so much a part of your career. I I Star Wars blew me away when I went to see it, and I remember coming home and trying to describe the story to my dad. So I was, like, 8 years old, and my dad was, like, oh, it's always boring when people try to describe movie plots to me. And I was begging I was begging him, please let me tell you. This is, like, the greatest movie ever. So That's funny. So so it's an honor to be able to to speak to you about it. Well, I've had a great time talking to you, James. Thanks very much, Jim, and good luck. Tarkin's coming out November 4th. I'm I'm definitely gonna get it, so good luck with it, and and thanks again. Thanks so much. Bye, Jim. Bye. For more from James, check out the James Altucher Show on the Stansbury Radio Network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today.
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