Wow. Now, I know when I was doing Star Wars stuff, I really tried to be cool and everything like that. There were only a couple of moments where I totally freaked out and kind of geeked out, in thinking about that. How have you been handling that? And when you’ve had that geek-out moment, what was it?
There’s a bunch of different things that I’ve geeked out about. It happened to me the other day when something that I was reading in research for the book—one of the novels, I was looking through a passage—for me, reading a story can take me back in the way that a lot people’s sense will take them back to a place, you know how it is. Reading this scene, I suddenly saw myself in my bedroom as a sixteen-year-old boy reading the book for the first time, and I remembered it distinctly. And I remembered sitting and reading this scene and thinking, ‘oh, I wonder what will happen?’ And I not only know what happens now, I get to be involved in it. Those sorts of geek-out moments are what happened to me when suddenly my brain runs face-first into memories of being the little fantasy nerd reading books in his bedroom. And it’s actually been kind of a hard process in some ways because—and I’m sure you know about this, Mike—you can’t always just do the fanboy thing. If you do, then the story is not going to come off as genuine. You can’t have every other page be a cameo by this character or that character. In fact, you have to be very, very sparing with that sort of thing, because otherwise the story—it’s just not going to feel right, it’s going to feel like a parody of itself. And that’s been an interesting process, splitting my mind and saying, okay what does the fan want, and what can I give him, and what am I not allowed to give him?
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