A while back — quite a while back — my good friend Mary Franklin of Lucas Licensing recommended that I join in the blogging fun here on starwars.com. It took me a while to do so — it's been a busy 2006. But here I am.

An Error of Comedies
     I think I'll start off with a little essay on comedy. I'm not going to discuss how to do comedy, but how what I write isn't comedy.
     No, really. It's true that I get a lot of e-mail from readers congratulating me on the comedy I write, and it really is time to set the record straight. I don't write comedy. I write humor. (Try to, anyway.)
     What's the difference? Well, there's a big difference.
     Comedy, at least as I interpret the word, is a genre unto itself, and one of the chief characteristics of a genre is that it imposes rules that affect the very way the universe works.
     In lower forms of comedy (by which I mean lowest-common denominator, not necessarily unfunny), blows landed in physical combat might make silly noises. Characters have up-close-and-personal contact with pies and animal feces. (That's "bantha poodoo" to you and me.) People fall down in spectacular and amusing ways, and in the rare instances that they suffer because of it, their suffering is also amusing. (Splayed landing positions and full-body casts are a sign that you're experiencing comedy.)
     As we climb up the comedy food chain toward realism, we still see events that are potentially injurious or fatal being played for laughs — falling off balconies and being hit by trucks result in guffaws rather than sympathy for the victims. (Just imagine putting the Three Stooges in a world where physics and biology work the way they do in reality.)
     Even higher, and the humor derives more from situations — often situations that are frequently encountered in real life — and dialogue. These situations still aren't necessarily truly realistic; they are often exaggerated, even wildly exaggerated, from their real-life equivalents, and coincidence usually plays a much greater role than in reality. As for dialogue, well, people can say funny things, but in comedy the timing is all about selling the joke, meaning that a straight man may say something no person in real life ever would in order to set up the comedian's punch line.
     But at each of these levels, the most significant, the most important characteristic of comedy is that its purpose is to make you laugh. Earning the laugh is Job One.
     Humor, again as I define it, operates under different laws. Sure, humor is about laughter, but I consider it to derive from the situation rather than to define the situation.
     For example, in real life, in the midst of a heartfelt parent-child discussion of something the child has just done and mustn't do again, the child may say something unexpectedly wise and breathtakingly funny — any parent can back me up on this. Is that comedy? No — the intent of the moment was instruction, correction of bad behavior, not evoking laughter. Yet laughter results. That's humor.
     So humor is light moments that arise out of circumstances that are themselves not necessarily comic. Generally, those moments don't alter the circumstances the characters are experiencing and only temporarily change the tone of the story.
     Smart people under pressure say and do funny things. Sometimes they find release in practical jokes, sometimes it's one-liners, sometimes it's other manifestations of humor. But it's still not comedy, even when the one-liners turn into rapid exchanges that go on for pages — the technical term for which is banter.
     Here's an example not related to my work. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones fights through obstacle after obstacle to rescue Marion. Being confronted with one last, huge, sword-wielding opponent, he casually shoots the man dead. This is funny... but it's not comedy. It's a moment bookended by action and death. It elicits a laugh, yes, but the moment obeys realistic rules, doesn't impose comedic rules, and doesn't alter the tension of Indy's situation.
     I won't say that there aren't moments of comedy in what I write. There are occasional scenes that are all about setting up the laugh. But I try hard to ensure that they don't define the surrounding novel. And the second Joram Kithe short story, League of Spies, could arguably be classified as comedy; the situation Kithe finds himself in is unrealistic and genuinely ridiculous. But it's worth remembering that Kithe's situation has been brought on by Chancellor Palpatine's efforts to undermine and weaken the Republic's intelligence community, which is itself a dark and tragic layer just underneath the humor of the story.
     So that's my screed on comedy vs. humor. Well, one part of a screed, anyway; I didn't even touch on some of the subsets of comedy (satire, black comedy, farce, parody, screwball, etc.), each of which imposes its own rules, some of which are different from "basic" comedy.

Betrayal Tour
     I started my Betrayal book tour last weekend, signing in two two-hour sessions at Wicket's Warehouse (Sound Stage One) at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, FL. Hundreds of copies sold, I signed until my hand got stiff and even after, and everyone seemed to go away happy. It was a lot of fun.
     (Let me add thanks here to David Moench and Lew Downard of Del Rey, and Rachel, Catherine, and Amy of Disney-MGM Studios. They made a complicated logistical setup into a pleasure.)

Errors Without Comedy
     Death, as it comes to all men, came to Charles Foster Kane, and mistakes, as they come to all books, came to Betrayal.
     One error that has been widely reported involves the relative ages of Zekk and Jaina. He's described as being in his late 20s, and longtime fans of the Young Jedi Knights know that (a) he's a little older than Jaina and (b) by the time of Betrayal Jaina must be around 31, so what the hey?
     Well, here's the hey, and it's far more complicated than anyone suspects — complicated enough that I thought some people might be entertained by it.
     The first thing yoiu have to understand is that the Legacy of the Force book series wasn't always supposed to begin in 40 ABY. At various times, its start date meandered back and forth across a four- or five-year span, the latest date of which was 40 ABY. At the time I began work on Betrayal, I think the start date was 37 ABY.
     At that time, the passage in which I first described Zekk mentioned him as being "in his late 20s" and "about Jaina's age." (Don't be too literal when interpreting the phrase "about Jaina's age." It doesn't mean "within a day or two/week or two/month or two of Jaina's age." That scene was being experienced from the point of view of Han and Leia, where the difference of a couple of years is well within the phrase "about Jaina's age.") Anyway, at the time of that draft, Zekk was about 29 and Jaina a couple of years younger.
     Then the start date of the series got cemented at 40 ABY, which would have placed Jaina's age at around 31 and Zekk's at around 33. (I'm estimating here because I'm away from my notes.) I edited the draft to update everything... but missed the age-related text in Zekk's and Jaina's first appearance.
     At this point I can only guess what happened, but my best guess is that someone in the copy-editing pipeline saw the paragraph and knew something was wrong. Knowing, or learning, that Jaina was 31, this person would have concluded that if Zekk were in his late 20s, he was therefore slightly younger than Jaina, and corrected the paragraph to say so.
     So rather than it being one mistake made by one person, it was a series of additive little mistakes made by a number of people. But since mine is the name on the book, responsibility rests with me.
     Inevitably, it won't be the only mistake that crops up. When you're writing a Star Wars book, you're juggling thousands of details, some of which are obscure or mutually contradictory. In spite of the tremendous effort made by the authors, the advance readers, the editorial staff at Del Rey and the continuity staff at Lucas Licensing, it's going to happen. (Sigh.)
     Yes, I know about Dunter/Dunton. Be quiet.

Home Base
     Details on upcoming stops on my book tour, and about every other aspect of what's going on in my professional life, appear at my home page, aaronallston.com. I hope to see you there as well.