## Chapter 10

1 Slipping someone’s name and/or personal characteristics into a book Is sometimes called Tuckerizing, after Wilson “Bob” Tucker, who did a lot of it throughout his writing career.

Normally, I do this in connection with charity auctions, where I auction off a walk-on role to the highest bidder. But sometimes, it’s just for fun. In Heir, I slipped in several friends, many from the Tampa-area Necronomicon convention, others just random friends as happened to occur to me.

This one is an Illinois friend named Don Vandersluis. If I remember, I’ll point out some of the others as we go along.

—TZ

2 In fact, as we all know, Luke knew about the torture before it actually happened. But under the circumstances Leia may have been a little fuzzy on the details.

Luke may also have fudged those same details a bit to keep Leia and the others from knowing how far away he’d been. Later, we’ll learn that he’s still keeping Dagobah’s significance a secret.

—TZ

3 Another Tuckerization: Mark Jones of Tampa. Fortunately, Mark never took offense that Jomark was only a minor world.

—TZ

4 In various sources this weapon is identified as a “Taim & Bak auto blaster cannon,” a “BlasTech Ax-108 ‘Ground Buzzer’ surface-defense blaster cannon,” and simply as “concealed blaster cannon.”

I figure that my term, underside swivel blaster, is probably a generic term for all such handy gadgets.

—TZ

5 The West End Games material gave me the model designation for the Falcon. Unfortunately, it didn’t mention that the ships were pretty common throughout the galaxy. Ergo, digging one up wouldn’t have been nearly as hard as Han implied here.

Probably what Han meant wasn’t that they’d found another YT-1300, but that they’d found one with the same quirks and add-ons as the Falcon. Sure—that’s what he meant.

—TZ

6 A couple of weeks after I finished Heir and sent it in, my editor, Betsy Mitchell, called to chat about the manuscript. In the course of the conversation she asked if I liked Han best of all the movie characters.

I assured her that I liked them all, and asked why she would think I liked Han best. She said, “Because you gave him all the best lines.”

She may have been right. But in all fairness, as far as giving Han good lines is concerned, George got there a long time before I did.

—TZ

7 Like Rogue Squadron, Page was another mostly background character whom other authors later picked up and ran with.

Ran with in both directions, in fact, as he was retroactively added into the Rebellion era.

Or at least his name was. There were certainly Rebel commandos running around making trouble for Palpatine’s Empire—it was only after Heir was published that Page was associated by name with some of those operations.

—TZ

8 Again, a word that echoes a familiar term—hacker—but is different enough to fit comfortably into the Star Wars universe.

—TZ