As part of our 2nd Birthday present to you, we interviewed Steve Sansweet - Author, Super Collector, Director of Content Management and Head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm. 

We discussed all manor of things including the recently released Complete Star Wars Encyclopaedia, his forthcoming book Star Wars: A Thousand Collectables – Memorabilia and Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and much more...

JN: It’s been a really busy couple of years for you, you’ve done three Celebrations, The Complete Star Wars Encyclopaedia and...
SS: Three?  Wait a second, three?  Where do you get three from?
JN: You’ve done the US, Europe, Japan...
SS: Oh what, you mean just in the last 18 months or the last two years?  Oh, ok.
JN: So how did you manage it all?

SS: No sleep.  I get like, five hours of sleep a night if I’m lucky.  And frankly, that’s beginning to wear a little, after doing five books in five years in my spare time, and I’ve just finished another and I’m going to take a bit of a break.  At least on the book front, anyway.
JN: I’d agree with you, I think you need to.  Let’s talk about the new Complete Star Wars Encyclopaedia before we get onto the new book if that’s OK.  There were ten years between the first version and this newly released version, and it’s only just come out in the UK [24th April 2009].  So how did you go about compiling it?  Did you start from scratch or did you take the original 1998 version and build on that?
SS: Well that was the original concept.  We have this ten year old book, we can use that as a starting point.  And it started out that way, but very quickly, Pablo (my main partner up until I realised I needed more help) and I became clear that nothing from the original encyclopaedia was going to stay.  Even the things that didn’t change, for whatever reason, everything is new and fresh and rewritten.  There may be one or two, some, entries that were lifted from the old encyclopaedia, but I’ll tell you, not many and certainly not many without changes.
JN: How did you go about dividing the work between the group of you?
SS: It was originally just supposed to be Pablo Hidalgo and me.  As we both started working on our first letters in late 2007 it became obvious that it wasn’t twice as much but nearly four times as much, so we kept working and working and my letters were getting longer even than his, which was pretty frightening and so at that point I realised I needed to bring in some more resources.  The first one I turned to was Bob Vitas and his Completely Unofficial Star Wars Encyclopaedia on the internet.  His site has always impressed me both for the way it was written and its obsession with getting things correct and the way it was laid out.  Bob was happy to pitch in and what we used Bob for was the encyclopaedia that he’d already done plus he was updating new fiction and comics as they came out and providing them to us before he even integrated them to the online book and then he was very, very helpful in going through everything and fact checking it, and he found a number of inconsistencies and duplications and things like that.  So that was a huge help.  It was always my plan to rewrite or write through and edit everything and so the book would have a consistency of voice.  When the size became obvious, that’s when I figured we needed at least one other person on the team and that’s when I approached Dan Wallace and asked him to do a big chunk of it and luckily he had just finished another project and so Dan came aboard.  And then we’re getting further and further along, and it’s just very time consuming and that’s when I brought in the final three members of the team, Mary Franklyn who works here, Josh Kushins who is in publicity here and Chris Cassidy who is an old friend who’s written a couple of Star Wars short stories and she is a freelance writer by trade.  And so we had all pouring in and I was still sort of reworking, adding and subtracting, doing what an editor does.  You know, I’ve basically touched every word of this book in some way or another.
JN: And how long did it take to put together?
SS: It was a solid year of work.  Obviously we all have full time jobs, so when I say a solid year of work it was nights, weekends, vacation time, so it’s basically like having two jobs.
JN: Are you happy with the end result and how the book has turned out?
SS: The Del Rey team was just fantastic to work with and my main contact there is the production manager, now line editor Erich Schoeneweiss, and Erich was and is a big Star Wars fan.  He understands this stuff and the designers were great and he made sure everything flowed and worked and for a project this big and with the pressures as much as they were it was as painless as they could make it.
JN: So when did you know when to stop?
SS: [laughing] When they said, “You know, Steve, if we don’t get this by x date we’re going to miss 2008 and there’s no way we can miss 2008”.  It was pushed back a month as it was.  The original book, the original solicitation online was a 2-volume book coming out in November and it was pushed back a month and became a 3-volume book and therefore the price had to go up and they were very flexible on everything except moving the date back to 2009.  You know, if you have the time you fill the time.  Nothing really suffered, although there were always things that I would have preferred to give a little more rewrite to or restructure but I’m very proud of it, the whole team is very proud of it, it came out and really met or exceeded our expectations as to what we were attempting to do.
JN: It’s a superb reference and it’s something that every Star Wars fan can use to fill in the gap of knowledge about anything to do with the Star Wars canon.
SS: Well, it’s sort of the official word and that’s important to a lot of fans.  It looks great, it’s a very inviting book and that, I think, is also a key to making a reference book work in this day and age when you can find so many of the raw facts online.  There’s still something in our society about a book and its portability and the colour and the design and it really is “the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts”, it really just builds up into being, oh my goodness, a work [of art].
JN: So what are you going to do now in terms of the encyclopaedia?  Whenever a new episode of the Clone Wars airs, is someone going to be writing down about all the new characters and events that occur?
SS: That is a thing that always happens at Lucasfilm.  There was a great interview in WIRED magazine last year about Leland Chee who is the keeper of the Holocron.  The Holocron is our internal continuity database, which doesn’t cover every single thing that ever there was, so there’s a lot in the encyclopaedia that wasn’t in the Holocron, especially some of the stuff before Leland’s time here, so only the last 10 years or so.  There was a lot of stuff from West End Games, you know you could just go on forever and ever.  It covers all of the major things and it really is kept very much up to date on all of the new stuff as it happens, and then we have this sort of continuity email group that sort of answers questions that members of the group might pose and comes up with names if all of a sudden some names are needed.  We work very closely with animation on the names of characters and we establish the planet that a character comes from and all of those kinds of questions, and if it’s an opportunity to establish something or for example if an author needs to name something, the author may have a suggested name or if Hasbro brings out a new action figure and they need a name for it we e-mail each other and work out what’s a good name.  People throw up names; usually one instantly rises up above the fray.
JN:  There’s always a lot of contention because the fans may give an astromech droid a name and then Hasbro will release it with a different name.
SS: All those things are researched.  We look at where the character first appeared and what makes sense if the character’s just had some strange nickname that the special effects crew used [when the filming was done or relating to a story board].  So we come up with a name that’s in universe, an in fantasy name that makes some sort of sense and has some kind of back story and those things are great fun.  So all that stuff is constantly done which is not to say the next time someone does another version of the written encyclopaedia there won’t be a lot to do.  Things change all the time in the Star Wars universe.
JN: They certainly do. 
SS: And will continue to change.
JN:  So when do you think we’ll see another version of the Encyclopaedia - in 10 years time or before that, what are the plans?
SS: There are no plans; I don’t even want to think about it. 
JN: It’ a year of your life each time so I can understand why  you can’t just keep going back to it – it’s a big deal.
SS: We’ll the first one was a year of my life full time.  It had to be pulled completely from scratch.  There was no Holocron, no internet references so that was even more of a labour and a much more solitary labour too.

Join us next week for the second part of our Interview with Steve Sansweet where we discuss his new book entitled Star Wars: A Thousand Collectables – Memorabilia and Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and also talk about Celebration V amongst other things...

Steve Sansweet is the Director of Content Management and Head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm and is somebody whom Adam and I are privileged to call our friend.

Steve Sansweet Interview: Copyright 2009 Jedi News, Lucasfilm.  No part of this interview can be reproduced without prior written consent from Jedi News.