It struck me that another very important step in gathering the particulars about a species was first deciding what species to include. That's coming up a lot in the comments to my other thread, so I'm going to expand upon it some, here.

There are countless species in the Star Wars universe. While we would have liked to include every one of them and of course, everyone's favorites (and some of our own) Ann and I knew we couldn't. Unlike a novel, an Essential Guide is a reference book, and from what I can tell, more restrictive with page count. Reality is a hard taskmaster, and page count can be filled all too easily, especially when you subtract what we called the "front matter" (title pages, acknowledgements, table of contents, and the like) and the "back matter" (index, bibliography, etc.). This led us to prioritize which species would be included and which would be left out or cut from the first edition of the book.

One afternoon about a year ago, Ann and I sat at her kitchen table with a stack of index cards. I wrote all the species names on them and then we started sorting. We had our "mandatory," "would like to include," "species of note," and "cut" piles. These piles formed a rough working outline for us. Any species or creatures seen in the movies had precedence (examples - Chagrians, Hutts, Wookies), followed by species prominent in the books and whose inclusion could reasonably be expected (examples - Bothans, Chiss, Yuuzhan Vong). Whether a species or creature was a main entry or a short entry in the species of note section of the book was determined by a few factors - how much did they impact story, how much did we know about them (this came into play often), and in the grand scheme of things, were there species who were more important.

With that rough outline in place, we had to consider page count. Ann made up and printed actual sheets of diagrams representing each page of the book - literally, a map of the book. This proved to be extremely helpful to me, in terms of mentally re-ordering how I saw each species or creature's importance in relation to the others. It was just genius of Ann to come up with this! My index cards seemed so puny! We blocked off pages for the front and back matter, then the species returning from the last book. We added the new mandatory species with full length entries, and took stock again. We asked ourselves if entries could be cut in length, moved from one section of the book to another, and so on, constructively arguing with ourselves and each other for each species. Adjustments were made to which species were in which pile, and this went back and forth into the book map. This enabled us to refine our outline further, to the degree we had something we could send off for approval.

We wanted to get the outline nailed down so we could start work in earnest. However, that afternoon, Ann and I also divided up what each of us was going to handle. Ann was going to work on the updates to returning species and creatures and I would take some of the new species, beginning with the species we knew would be included in both our cases. We knew what we were doing could be changed with the feedback we'd receive from Del Rey / Random House and the Ranch, but at least we could get started.