How closely did you work with Lucas Licensing on Darth Plagueis? How much did George get involved? What advice did he give you?
George was involved in the early stages. When the book was first proposed, I wrote to him and asked whether there was any reason why Plagueis couldn't be a non-human, and he wrote back that Plagueis could be a Muun and sent me some artist renderings of the character. From that point on, everything was approved, as they're saying, “at the highest level.” I worked most closely with George's right-hand man at Lucas licensing, Howard Roffman. It was a strange way to go about the book, because I kind of had to bypass both Del Rey and the usual editorial staff at Lucasfilm and work directly with Howard over the course of what amounted to about a year of preparation.
I submitted many, many versions of the outline until we finally reached consensus on where we wanted to go with the book. The marketing text about “this is canon at the highest level” – I suppose that's true, that a lot of the stuff came from the very top levels of Lucasfilm. Everything was approved at that high level. I had to make the assumption that Howard was speaking directly with George about a lot of this stuff. I didn't have any meetings directly with George, but it seemed like a lot of the approval was coming through him to Howard. I was not privy to all of the things that happened behind the scenes.
