## Chapter 17

1 West End Games’s source material included a splendid X-wing schematic, with all the cool tech stuff a writer could ever ask for.

—TZ

2 It’s always important that the heroes have a plan for getting out of whatever trouble the writer has thrown them into. Even if the plan is never used, or isn’t used the way the character expected, heroes need to be proactive. Luke can’t just sit around hoping that by some stroke of luck he’ll be rescued.

Well, okay—technically, he is just sitting around right now. But you know what I mean.

—TZ

3 This was the description of Kashyyyk that I was given: immensely tall trees with Wookiee cities perched on them, with a layered ecology that got more and more vicious as you traveled down toward the ground below. Sort of an organic version of the tall, layered cityscape of Coruscant, now that I think about it.

I was really looking forward to getting a glimpse of that world when I heard it would be featured in Revenge of the Sith. I was also curious as to the kind of tactics the Wookiees would use against the Separatist forces on such a battlefield. But either the planet had been redesigned when I wasn’t looking, or else George simply chose to use a ground-level area of the world for that scene.

Maybe someday in a special edition…

—TZ

4 I got to experience this same effect on a recent cruise to Alaska. When looking over the rail at a glacier, with no trees, animals, or other objects near the ice to show scale, it was impossible for me to get a genuine feel for the size of what I was seeing. A chunk that Looks like an ice cube falls off, and a boom rolls across the water, and you realize that the “ice cube” was probably the size of a refrigerator.

—TZ

5 I generally like to use brackets when I’m showing that a character is speaking in an alien language. It’s always seemed to me that an odd touch like that helps add to the alienness of the speech.

—TZ

6 Just in case the brackets weren’t enough alienness, I also threw in an extra letter at the end of r-ending words.

This is the sort of thing that drives copy editors crazy…

—TZ

7 I needed to be able to have actual conversations with one of the Wookiees, and since I’d committed myself to never directly translating Chewie (it was never done in the movies), I came up with this idea that a “speech impediment” actually made Ralrra easier for humans to understand.

—TZ

8 A close hug does look a lot like vertical wrestling, after all. Probably even more so with Wookiees.

—TZ

9 One of the neat things about the Star Wars universe is that there’s always room for something new. Jumping off of the Kashyyyk background that I’d been given, I was able to add a few new things, such as the kroyies, into the ecological system.

—TZ

10 I liked the idea of Wookiees being arboreal and living on huge trees kilometers above the ground. The problem was that they didn’t seem to be built for that sort of life. So I added the protractible claws to make tree-climbing practical.

Unfortunately, in the process I forgot my own admonition that I needed to pay attention to what wasn’t seen in the movies. Specifically, why weren’t these claws ever seen, particularly when Chewie was fighting for his life?

Fortunately, the West End Games folks also spotted the lapse and came to my rescue. In one of the later sourcebooks they explained that it was a matter of honor that Wookiees never used these claws in combat, but kept them strictly for climbing.

—TZ

11 Art imitating life. I have the same problem that I’m attributing here to Leia. Airplanes don’t bother me; the Seattle Space Needle observation deck does.

—TZ