The Force is Strong with This One
So my next writing project has finally showed up on Amazon. Guess it’s not a secret any more! A few months back I penned a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type book for Penguin Books as a tie in for the upcoming Clone Wars movie and TV show. Unlike the rest of the bevy of books Penguin is releasing with this license, “The Way of the Jedi” features a cast of original characters, with the protagonist — a nameless Padawan — being anonymous so as to let you, the reader, cast this role as you wish. Readers of the site know this isn’t my first dabbling with Star Wars books, or my first stab at a choose-your-own-adventure story, but to write one on this scale, and for such a respected publisher… well, it was an amazing opportunity. I hope that kids will enjoy this book as much as I used to enjoy reading and re-reading the works of Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery back in the day.
What made writing this so much fun was coming up with all the semi-gruesome “bad endings.” Yes, your Jedi-in-training can be eaten alive, turned into a cyborg, tempted to the dark side, among a couple dozen other possible fates. Not quite so simple was trying to write for what Star Wars canon is now with a personal vision from another era. Timothy Zahn and even Republic Commando have little bearing on Clone Wars. If I was an encyclopedia of nerdery before, I came out of this experience with a whole new tome of obscure jargon.
Thanks to my editor, Rob Valois (who was also the editor who got Return to Labyrinth going!) for the opportunity.
11. July 2008 at 1:02 pm :
Where’s the amazon link? I’m ready to buy…
11. July 2008 at 6:55 pm :
Cool!
I’m interested to hear how you wrote it. Did you have to make some sort of matrix to keep track of all the decisions a reader could make?
12. July 2008 at 5:50 pm :
Cool project! Actually, there’s an indirect connection between Labyrinth and the Star Wars series: George Lucas produced both of them.
14. July 2008 at 11:02 am :
Dorcas,
I started out with a notepad to create such a matrix, and in the end, about half of those endings appeared in the original book. At first, however, too many choices boiled down to “do you go left or right?” — in other words, fairly arbitrary. At a certain point, I realized it was sometimes useful to pick a thread and write from beginning to end and see what branching paths organically arose. My goal was to make each path feel like a self-contained story, and not like dead-ends and wrong turns on a single story. Not having to adhere to the plot of the Clone Wars movie helped with that. -Jake
14. July 2008 at 4:17 pm :
Yay! I’m glad that it’s up on Amazon!
15. July 2008 at 3:19 pm :
Ah, if only I liked Star Wars, I’d buy the book to support you! Don’t worry though, I’ll make up for it by telling all my friends about Return to Labyrinth.
Then again, I always end up dying in those books. No matter what I choose I’ll end up dying, even if it seems like the most obvious answer.
The choice could be between staying on the dock, or jumping into the mouth of a shark, and it’ll turn out that jumping into the sharks mouth would’ve saved me from the giant octopus that lurked underneath the dock.
((And randomly, I got a Jareth action figure today! It’s the one that comes with Hoggle and boy howdy does he have the new toy smell))
22. July 2008 at 10:00 am :
Right on, Jake! If anyone was born to do these kinds of books, it’s you!
6. October 2008 at 8:43 pm :
Congratz Jake!!! I am proud of you. btw how about calling James or myself? We are wondering how you are doing and would like to see you someday????
7. October 2008 at 1:33 pm :
805-234-6265 we have been friends since child birth. plz call me jake and not be such a relcuse….. plz plz i miss u jake. i luv u so does James and Jack