This was done in the Jaina/Jag index at boards.theforce.net, but deals a lot with my general practices in writing.

The Basics

Some basics. My nickname is Kaki and I'm an East-coaster who is at college in Utah. I'm 24. Non-SW hobbies are music and drawing.

What do you enjoy about writing?

I love writing because I can put so much of myself into it. I grew up in a house where emotion was discouraged and even punished, so I couldn't really express myself. Instead, I would get myself to sleep by pretending I was the protagonist in a fairy tale and exploring what made me happy or mad or made me want to cry. This is the earliest version of writing/storytelling that I can remember doing and it was often the only way I could express emotions. That's held true ever since and writing has been my haven through stressful times, an abusive marriage, and other sorts of things.

Some people may claim that this is why I write so much death and destruction, but that's not a matter of venting anger (for the most part). I like writing best when I have to deal with matters of transition, forced maturity, and loss. They tend to be the most emotionally charged things and interest me the most from a psychological standpoint.

What got you into Star Wars?

A very stubborn mother. No, I'm serious. My parents went to A New Hope the first day it was out in theaters because my dad was working with missionaries in San Antonio, TX, and the mission president wanted to know if this movie about the fight between good and evil was appropriate for the missionaries to see. They've been fans ever since and, with the exception of ROTS when my mom was one day away from playing her graduate recital, they have gone to the midnight showings of every movie since then.

So, you'd think that I'd grow up being a Star Wars junkie. Well, not really. My other passion in life is the American Civil War and the first time I had a chance to watch Star Wars at a friend's house, they had just gotten a copy of Robert E. Lee's memoirs. I didn't want to watch some scary movie called Return of the Jedi, so I sat under the television stand and read the memoirs while wishing they'd turn down the volume.

Six years later, when I was 13, is when the stubborn mother came into play. I had been Princess Leia for a Halloween-in-July party the year before, but thought that Leia was Elizabeth's weird younger sister. My mom had gotten six tickets to an all-day marathon of the Star Wars trilogy at the movie theater in Burlington that was opening that day. She claimed it was a family requirement for me to go see it. I grudgingly went along and thought that there could be nothing worse than watching three movies while sitting between a 500-pound Elvis impersonator and a gay guy in nothing but purple spandex.

Well, the moment Darth Vader stepped on the screen, I forgot all about the spandex guy. I laughed, cried, cheered, clapped. I was probably the only person in the whole theater who didn't know that Luke and Leia were brother and sister. I came out of Empire Strikes Back going "OH my gosh! I can't believe Leia is with Han, not Luke!" and getting all these weird looks.

Well, after that experience, I was hooked. Irreversably.

To follow that, what specifically drew you to writing fanfiction?

Well, the same night after I saw the trilogy, I had my first Star Wars dream about Darth Vader and Leia and I woke up thinking it wasn't fair that the movies ended there.

So, I made up a story where the Emperor had gone through a time portal when he was thrown down that reactor shaft, he went to the future and came back with, basically, battle droids who could aim. Lando was an Imperial spy named Nicholas. Leia was a better fighter pilot than Luke and personally blew up the "Death Moon." Han was completely ignored because I didn't know how to write him. Darth Vader decided to surrender after one battle and then they let him live happily-ever-after. The script was 60 pages, the novelization 80. I did the script until school got out, then sat around all summer and wrote the novelization. Yes, I'm laughing at myself looking at this again.

It was really bad writing and a complete waste of time, but I realized from that that I could write my own Star Wars stuff. When I found out a year later about this guy named Timothy Zahn and read his stuff, I got super-excited and started writing Han/Leia romance like a fiend.

My tastes have changed slightly, as, thankfully, has my writing, but that's the main thing that has always attracted me to fanfiction: the ability to press on with what we love.

What is it about Jaina Solo and Jagged Fel that made you want to write about them?

This is weird, but I feel like Jag is more a self-insertion for me. I'm a lot like him on some levels, but a lot like Jaina in other ways. Mostly, I'm like him. Disciplined, not very free with emotions by practice, insightful and very oddly amusing. The combination of the Solo spirit and the Fel discipline and the inherent snark that can be done between the two is what attracted me most at first. I also was intrigued by what might make it work, since there would be some amusing differences to overcome with Han as the father-in-law. The first meeting of Han/Jag that I did was written around the loose framework of the beginning of Shrek 2. Not that I'm calling Jag an ogre, but they're definitely coming from different places for the purpose of loving Jaina. I think Jaina works well with him for purposes of balance. He's able to ground her and she's able to draw him out more.

You've been writing a trilogy for the two characters. How about giving Jaina/Jag fans a little synopsis and a couple hints of what to expect?

You ever been on a roller coaster that makes you want to scream, cheer, and puke in succession? Well, that's pretty much what to expect. This is one of those trilogies that goes through a lot of emotional impacts because it deals with three very important events in anyone's life-love, marriage, and parenthood. Part 1 should make you laugh a lot. Part 2 is the inducer of "awwwwwwwwwwws". Part 3 has been known to induce sobbing and snarling at the screen or going "awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww" again.

Part 1, Under My Skin, starts out when Jag and Jaina are not on good terms, since she has basically shoved him as far away as she can to avoid him loving her. Nevertheless, when she and three other pilots are shot down and Gavin asks Jag to mount a rescue attempt, he still has duty or love enough to go after her anyway. Naturally, things don't go as planned and she and Jag are left for dead and behind enemy lines, so they have to trek to help and escape. During this process, they figure out why things haven't worked in the slightest and what they have to do to overcome this. It ends with her finally admitting that he's gotten under her skin and into her heart.

Part 2, You Take Romance, starts just after that. Jag meets the parents and gets the seal of approval. He and Jaina fall officially in love, get engaged, then married.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING.

Part 3, All Too Soon, starts where you probably wouldn't expect: with Leia arriving at Jaina's apartment to find out that Jag's been killed on a mission. Jaina's three months pregnant with twins. The rest of the story explores the ways in which she's able to move past, what happens to make her fall in love again (With Kyp), and has a lot of flashbacks to explain the nature of her love for Jag and how that affects her new love. In the end, she's reunited in death with Jag, the daughter she miscarried, and another daughter who died of unknown causes.

I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty details, but those are the basic plotlines.

I see that you seem to write longer stories versus vignettes or songfics. What draws you to this type of story? What can you tell us about the rewards and difficulties of writing a longer story?

I've done plenty of vignettes, just not very recently. I went through a phase where that was practically all I did. I still do them whenever I have complete writer's block, so I can get my creative juices flowing again. They are, of course, mostly not on the Beyond the Saga boards. I do admit to having done only one songfic. I'd been reading so much of Dantanaskywalker's stuff that I wanted to try my hand and she gave me a song to use, coached me through the process, and I was pleased with the results.

As for why I like writing longer stories... Well, like I said in the first question, I'm rather addicted to transitional and loss-oriented fics, so I tend to feel that I can't get all of the emotional effect that I want when writing very short fics. I want each story to have some moments of extreme hope and extreme despair, the two ends of the spectrum. I'm probably a bit of what you might call a shock jock because what I love best in writing stories is to get a major reaction to anything that I write. All of my favorite reader replies have been ones where the leadup to the post has rendered them practically incoherent. With vignettes, this is certainly possible, but I like to write through that experience. Is this making any sense at all?

Probably the best example of this is that the trilogy was supposed to be a duology, nothing more. I was going to have it end with the very happily-ever-after moment of them getting married. I did, however, want to explore what might happen if that happily-ever-after was pretty much shattered. There's a fourth part that I'll be writing by the time this is put up that explains the time between You Take Romance and All Too Soon. In All Too Soon, we first know that Jaina's pregnant. Then, we find out that it's not the first time she's been pregnant. We find out that she tried to kill herself, but don't know why. Then, we find out that she had a daughter named Mered, but that this daughter has never been mentioned before. The next post explains that Jaina went very hysterical one day because of the loss of her best friend and when she came out of that, she realized her daughter wasn't breathing. We're not sure if this is because of her hysteria or not and she's not sure, so she's pretty devastated by what she might have done. Her daughter's in intensive care and Jag arrives (has been on a mission) to hold her once before she dies. So, that makes the experience of her having another child after he's been killed very emotionally charged.

You've written far more than just Jaina/Jag, as evidenced by your stories being posted in all the forums. What can you tell us about some of your other favorite characters?

Well, if you're talking about my all-time favorite character, it's actually an Original Character that I got permission to borrow. Her name's Waqkemé Noori, but you always see her referred to as Kemé. Ophelia created her and I first read her in a fic about Obi-Wan's first four days as Anakin's Master and how he copes with the loss of Qui-Gon. She's his Padawan "sister"-Qui-Gon's first apprentice and a lot more like Anakin than Obi-Wan. There's a lot of humor that she's capable of, but she's also a very empathetic person and feels things too strongly at times. I got the permission from Ophelia to write her backstory and have been having too much fun with that, as well as using her in regular stories as combination psychotherapist/comic relief. She's the type who can quote passages of Jedi Confucius from memory, but you can also find her in the Archives, reading children's books by Yoda. She highly amuses me. I probably bewildered Dantana when I got in the car and said triumphantly, "I just got permission to kill Kemé!"

For my own characters, I am very attached to one I created as a humorfic character named Liara Khe. She's an overly-ambitious librarian basically who ends up having all sorts of disastrous and humorous adventures. (Don't blame me, it was for the Jemmiah Chronicles!) One of these adventures results in her Master dying, so she's reassigned at the age of 20 to work with a normal Jedi Master and becomes a field warrior. The transition is especially interesting to me, but since then, I've used her kind of as a voice of the Jedi. I've written her on the day that she found out that a Sith had killed Qui-Gon Jinn and her realizing that she can't promise her Padawan that she'll always be protected by the Force. I wrote an especially interesting piece called In Song and Story about the Battle of Geonosis, where another archivist has to take down her account of the Battle as she's seriously injured and she dies off-screen while he's transcribing her report. But then again, I also have written her in humorous vignettes where she'll get duped into being married at her best friend's bachelorette party or such things.

As for canon character, it's probably no surprise that my favorites are Rieekan, Bail, and Leia. I've been called by one semi-adoring fan (*coughcoughThePariahcoughcough*) "The Tolkien of Alderaan." This is mostly because the idea of a pacifist world and the people it produces really fascinates me. I like writing Leia in a lot of different capacities-as betrayer, as betrayed, as innocent, as jaded, and definitely in the aftermath of her world's destruction. I love looking at what she might have 'inherited' from Bail as well as what part of her comes from Vader and her mother. Rieekan I originally wrote as basically her shoulder to cry on, but he's evolved into a kind of counselor/understanding friend type who both keeps her grounded and shares in her sorrows. He's the more practical one. Pretty overelaborating for someone who was in 5 minutes of the whole trilogy, but that's my prerogative. I love writing Bail because there's a strong evidence of Leia's character in the way we see him and I love writing headstrong characters with strong conflicts.

As a tie in to that, who do you feel, or what era do you feel, allows for the most possibilities for the writer?

I think it definitely depends on the author and the time. A year ago, I would have never said that I'd be writing a lot of Beyond the Saga fics. I would definitely never have explored Kyp/Jaina, as evidenced by the fact that the first time I got in trouble was for being too vocally anti-K/J during last year's Summer Awards. I think there's possibility for absolutely everything, especially because we dabble in Alternate Universes. If I had to pick an era to expand the most, it would be between the movies of the Original Trilogy. There's so much obvious character development that we completely miss out on.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about your other "activities" on the JC? I know that you started and run the JC Title Challenge, for example.

Thanks for the shameless plug opportunity for the JC Title Challenge. Just kidding. I started that because I'm constantly frustrated by coming up with titles for stories and I know that many of my friends have the same problem, so the Title Challenge came into being for the purpose of mutual benefit. We've had some very funny or poignant titles and have had fantastic results, I think. I was surprised that it took off as well as it did.

I'm also the founder and organizer of the Angst Awards. This is considered by many to be redundant, but the fact is that we have to nom one angst story for each era each awards, but we don't get to acknowledge the other kinds of gut-wrenching that make it such a difficult choice. Seeing the nominees and winners for things like "Best Non-lightsaber fight" and "Best Death of a Canon Character" was great.

On the other hand, one of my favorite personal challenges was last November. A friend complained that I was getting too addicted to my angst, so challenged me to write a story where the greatest injury was a stubbed toe. I wrote that, but in addition, I decided to go without angst for an entire month. You Take Romance was written almost entirely during that time, as were many of my humorfics (She Kissed My Wookiee, Always A Bridesmaid, etc.). It nearly drove me crazy because that was the month when I had viral bronchitis, then surgery, was in a car accident, and my husband started beating me on a regular basis, but I figure that if I can survive all that and still make people laugh, I can pretty much survive the rest of life. I'm going to do that again this year.

Alternately, I've vowed to go from post 20,001 for one year without a single character death. No one believes I can do it, but I'm going to!

I'm also one of the writers on the Virtual Sequels project. This is the trilogy of scripts, artwork, novelizations, etc. written by the fans for the fans and we are now on Episode 8. I was taken on originally to do the novelization for Episode VII, but am now working on the Episode 8 stuff as well. It covers the story of Ben and Kane Skywalker, Luke's two sons, and the emergence of a Sith threat, their brush with Dark Side influence, and how each has to overcome it. I won't give any more away.

The most recent development is my taking over of the Provo, UT Fanforce, which is where I'm at college and living three blocks in one direction from DantanaSkywalker, three blocks in another direction from MiaTieska, and one block from Laura_Anu, among others. It's a great group and we have so many diverse talents, but it's great to be so close to so many writers. We have occasional sessions where we'll just escape with notebooks or computers to the Vermillion Skies Café and sit there for hours, writing and discussing.

And For a Fun Bit of Trivia...

July 17th (tomorrow) will mark the one year anniversary of DarthIshtar writing Jaina/Jag fanfiction.