I have my first question! Thanks Hansgirl13!

What did you have to do to gather the particulars about all of the species and make sure it was all correct?

Gathering the particulars about a species is research and not very different than what you'd do for a paper at school - you read the books and comics, watch the movies again, play the video games... but while taking notes. You also gather your own reference material, books such as Wizards of the Coast's Ultimate Alien Anthology (an RPG book), the various Visual Dictionaries from DK Publishing and the other books in the Essential Guide series. The research for the New Essential Guide to Alien Species was a bit easier than school work in the sense that we knew what to look for (general biological stuff like amphibious, air-breather, etc., what makes a species similiar or dissimilar to other species, is there something really cool or noteworthy about a species, and so on). Conversely, it was harder in some ways because of the shear volume of material to go through. The information we'd look for was sometimes no more than a line in a book or snippet of the narration in a video game. I've been a fan all my life, so I wasn't starting the research from scratch, thankfully.

Making sure it's all correct takes teamwork. When Ann Lewis (my co-author, and author of the first Essential Guide to Alien Species) and I wrote the entries, we were careful to footnote where we were drawing material from and what we were creating as original material. We checked and double-checked entries right up to when we submitted the manuscript, and we were lucky in that we could proof each other's work. Also, while writing the entries, Ann and I turned to a few very special and extraordinarily helpful people when we had questions, such as Dan Wallace and Abel Pena. After submission, the manuscript was then veted by our editor at Random House, the wonderful Keith Clayton, and checked by a number of employees at Lucasfilm. There were a lot of eyeballs on that manuscript.

Until later, take care!