## Chapter 19

1 This image of carved wood with blue light shining through the gaps comes from a couple of visits we made to a place called the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. It’s an absolutely stunning architectural masterpiece, and several of the rooms have this sort of background lighting.

—TZ

2 I read mythology voraciously when I was a child, and my favorites were the Norse myths. This one is straight out of the Siegfried legend-all we’re missing is a sword stuck in the tree.

—TZ

3 “What is a Froffli-style haircut?”

I got asked this kind of question a lot with Heir and the other two books. The questions came from my editor, Lucasfilm, the copy editor, or sometimes all three.

The answer: I don’t know. The idea was to sprinkle these alien non-Earth references throughout the books, with the intent being to add a little more Star Wars feeling to it.

Of course, the throwaway lines also served another, more devious purpose. The reader never knew whether one of these things was merely some local color, or whether it was a subtle setup to an important plot point somewhere down the line.

An aside: the comics depict Chin’s hair as spiky.

—TZ

4 The official currency of the Star Wars galaxy is the credit, but I never really liked that term—I guess it always seemed too fifties SF to me. (So do blasters, actually, but for some reason that one doesn’t bother me nearly as much.)

So I took a page from Han’s bargaining with Obi-Wan for the Alderaan trip and tried wherever possible to simply avoid mentioning the type of currency, figuring that it would be understood by both parties.

—TZ

5 When I was offered this first Star Wars contract, and I was wandering the house trying to think up a story, the ysalamiri and their effect on the Force was the first thing that came to my mind. The initial idea was to use them to build a sort of cage around a captured Jedi.

Interestingly enough, even though that was the first idea I had, the story ended up growing in another direction and it never actually made it into any of the three books. That specific aspect of the idea had to wait several more years, until Vision of the Future.

—TZ