My New Star Wars Short Story!

The From a Certain Point of View trilogy is now complete!

There’s the teaser card for my new Star Wars short story “Kernels and Husks,” which is part of the From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi anthology from Random House Worlds, out Aug. 29. (Here’s a preorder link which will benefit the Jason Fry Beer & Mortgage Fund.)

It’s a honor to be asked back to complete the From a Certain Point of View trilogy, and I’m proud to say I’m one of the very few authors with a story in all three installments. And I’m excited to read all the other stories, and welcome the new authors to the weird and wonderful caravan of Star Wars storytellers.

Was it a blast to write about Sim Aloo? Of course it was — I’ve loved the Imperial advisors since their creepy cameo back in 1983, and I picked Sim because he was the one who got a Kenner action figure back then. From the start, the advisors all but screamed storytelling possibilities: Their headgear and robes hint at Imperial pomp and circumstance we never saw in the original trilogy, and they’re all sour-looking old men, giving off a crabs-in-a-bucket decadent courtier vibe that’s impossible to resist.

I’ll say one more thing about this story, and then you gotta wait for month’s end: I read about an unfortunately too common accident that's a horrible way to die and couldn't get it out of my head. If you’re a writer, the next thought was inevitable: Could you murder someone that way? That bothered me even more ... so I exorcised it by writing this story.