#and b/c it would be funny for Morgan to get friend adopted by two different mutant turtles who don't know eachother lol

[tblsomedoodles]

i find it adorable that not only did the "just do both" option win by a lot, but Morgan and George tied. You guys essentially said "send both" twice lol : )

Well, i guess i've got a couple submissions to fill out, i suppose. wish me luck!

[jasonfry]

Notes: Rebel in the Ranks, Pt. 2

WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Rebel in the Ranks. If you haven’t read it, stop and go here.

(Here’s the first part of the notes.)

Part 2: Impersonation

There’s a good reason the second part of Rebel in the Ranks is called Impersonation: Zare has become a cadet under false pretenses, while Merei infiltrates the Transportation Ministry claiming to be Kinera Tiree, the daughter of Lothal’s education minister. But aliases and mistaken identities are woven throughout the book. Dev Morgan, of course, is really Ezra Bridger. When Merei meets Zeb and Sabine, they use their Spectre code names, with Merei wryly adopting the nom de guerre Merei-1. Characters repeatedly call others by the wrong name – Currahee refers to Pandak Symes as “Sykes,” while Jix Hekyl scrambles Merei’s last name into “Spamjack.”

This is really Merei’s section. Zare’s story is in something of a holding pattern during Part 2 – it’s the arrival of Dev Morgan in Part 3 that forces a reckoning. I hadn’t anticipated that as a storytelling danger, and was lucky that I’d done enough with Merei’s character to be able to turn the focus to her.

Still, that put a lot of weight on her piece of the narrative – the story couldn’t sag while we waited around for the events of “Breaking Ranks.” So I got to work, researching how Merei could break into the Transportation Ministry. Professional pride came into play: I roll my eyes when movie hackers squint, type a little and HEY PRESTO they’re into the computer system, and I was determined to do better. I wanted a break-in that was not just exciting but also plausible.

Investigating the trademarks of successful hacks, I found that most depend more on social engineering and human laziness than ingenious programming, and rely on physical presence instead of remote entry. Which was honestly better for my story: there’s something not just lazy but also bloodless about a lone hacker typing. To achieve her goals, Merei would have to put herself in danger of direct discovery. If things went wrong, the indicator wouldn’t be a flashing icon on a screen but a drawn blaster.

A funny thing: I did some of the research into Merei’s hack in the San Diego airport after 2014’s Comic-Con. (While Googling, I heard a strangely familiar voice berating someone over a cellphone, looked up and realized it was a rather grumpy Adam West.) It crossed my mind that maybe I shouldn’t use the Delta Sky Club’s Wi-Fi to research network intrusions. What if NSA agents appeared to drag me away, Dhara Leonis-style? Would they really believe all that research was to craft a Star Wars story about a teenaged slicer? Fortunately, neither Batman nor the government decided to cart me off.

Anyway, Merei uses a “snooper” program, essentially a keylogger with a built-in timer. But she really depends on everyday human failings to get in and out of the Transportation Ministry: she exploits its employees’ laziness, fear of getting in trouble, love of gossip and aversion to conflict. Which are the weaknesses most real-world hackers and phishers exploit. I was pleased when one reviewer called Rebel one of the few young-adult books she’d read that actually portrayed a realistic hack based on social engineering.

Another reader reaction to Merei’s story in Rebel has stuck with me – not long after the book came out, someone tweeted at me that she’d grown up wanting to be a coder only to be told that girls couldn’t code. Thank you for this, she said, more than you know. I hadn’t really thought much about representation in Star Wars or my own fiction before then – Merei was simply a character I liked who played a role in the story and whose importance grew in response to that story’s needs. But I thought about it a lot more after that.

I grew up in the 1970s reading about and watching heroes who looked like me – people who looked like me were and still predominantly are fiction’s default protagonists. It never occurred to me that other kids didn’t have that experience, or to think about what it must be like to have people who looked like me relegated to being sidekicks, bit players or comic relief. Interactions like that tweet convinced me this stuff mattered, not just according to some abstract metric of fairness but to real readers – ones who’d tweet but also ones who’d simply curl up with a book. After that, I was determined to help raise a bigger fictional tent that invited more people in – and I was convinced that bigger tent would yield better stories and, yes, a better world.

OK, off my soapbox. One more thing before the notes: I struggled with how Zare and Merei could talk with each other and how much they could say. My original idea was that the Empire didn’t monitor cadets’ communications after orientation, which I explained as a relic of the honor code of the Republic still alive in the Imperial military. As hand-waves go, I’ll give it a C+. Story Group shot that down by noting that a) it didn’t fit with what we’d see in John Jackson Miller’s A New Dawn and b) if that were the case, then why did Ezra send Chopper out with a holographic message?

Happily, Story Group had a better idea, suggesting that Zare be able to talk from Maketh Tua’s office. That solved not one but two problems: Tua’s office could also be the location where Ezra climbs into the ductwork.

Notes on Part 2:

The treatment had more about stormtrooper training vs. officer training, with the idea that everyone went through basic training and officer training kicked off in the spring. But I dropped it because it sapped the story of its urgency. Yes, Zare was stuck – but he’d also been stuck in Edge of the Galaxy, and I knew he’d really be stuck in Imperial Justice. The reader wanted to see Zare trying to get unstuck, and any intimation that the best course of action was for him to wait flattened out the storytelling.

Merei’s parents, Jessa and Gandr, were mentioned but not named in Edge of the Galaxy. Jessa is the name of a character in Han Solo at Stars’ End, my favorite Star Wars novel, so I reused it here. Gandr’s origin, on the other hand, is a little embarrassing. While plotting out Rebel I used “Goose” and “Gander” as placeholders for Merei’s parents. “Goose” had to go, but I got kind of attached to “Gander,” and thought it fit Merei’s distracted, slightly goofy father. So I dropped a letter and kept it. The same thing happened in Jupiter Pirates – the Securitat agent DeWise bears a placeholder name that I struggled to improve on and finally kept.

Yahenna Laxo, the chatty/scary boss of the Gray Syndicate, really comes into his own in Imperial Justice, but was one of my favorite characters from the beginning. Originally I imagined him as a Shell Hutt, but that made the Gray Syndicate feel like a bigger player in the Lothal underworld than it should be. So Laxo became a doughy crime boss with an impressive pompadour and bedroom slippers. And that turned out to be more fun.

By the way, the Gray Syndicate’s headquarters used to be Ake’s Tavern from Ezra’s Gamble, a Rebels tie-in book written by my good friend Ryder Windham. Even the gouge on the floor is still there.

Baseball fans will recognize that cadets de Grom and Wheeler share last names with a pair of talented Mets pitchers. What can I say? Beyond being a Mets fan, I was running low on evocative names.

The Pillar in the assessment hall is just the Well from “Breaking Ranks” turned inside out. I knew I’d have multiple scenes in the Well in Part 3 of the book, so I looked for a way to shake things up a bit before then.  

One difference from writing Legends stories is that new canon has downplayed or discarded some “spacey” terms – for instance, characters get to use bathrooms instead of refreshers. That was still new to me and I needed some nudging from Story Group – for example, I described the Transportation Ministry as “duracrete and clari-crystalline.” That got revised to “stone and glass,” which is far better. It gives you a picture without running the risk of tripping up the reader.

I got stuck in another lingo-related box canyon later in the book when Jessa’s describing the odds of picking out a transmission from Merei’s snooper program. I spent an absurd amount of time looking for an equivalent to “needle in a haystack,” finally proposing “needle in a grain barge.” I didn’t really like that, but I’d given up in despair. Enter editor extraordinaire Jen Heddle, who rather sensibly pointed out that as a farm world, Lothal undoubtedly had … haystacks. And so we wound up back at the beginning, and the simple answer I should have gone with in the first place.

Next up: The adaptation game, Zare vs. the Inquisitor, and a big cliffhanger.