A Conversation With Author EK Johnston

[00:00:00] What are you currently fangirling about?

[00:00:08] Oh man, I feel like I'm always fangirling something, although usually sometimes I'm

[00:00:12] also tired.

[00:00:14] I really wish I could fangirl Willow, but I can't watch it anymore, so it's difficult

[00:00:19] to fangirl something when you don't have access to it.

[00:00:21] I had like a 24 hour period where I was like 22 hours of that.

[00:00:25] I was like a hardcore Willow fangirl. then I realized that everybody who wrote those books, not everybody, but like many of the people who wrote those books are actually not great humans. And the books are usually pretty misogynistic and really often racist. And so I kind of fell out of adult fantasy for a while. And YA had all the like new sort of inclusive stuff. So I read a lot of that. But now there's been this kind of

[00:01:42] resurgence in fantasy. And when I say resurgence, a couple of books, Most Wanted by Ray Carson and the solo novelization by Mer Lafferty. She's also been in a bunch of the comics that take place like in the Return of the Jedi era.

[00:03:01] Those are by Charles Soule and Greg Pack.

[00:03:04] And I am writing her during the solo movie. that the actress is in because I wanted to sort of get an idea of her facial expressions. She doesn't, she has a very, very good stoic face in obviously Game of Thrones and in Terminator. And then I watched a few of her like more contemporary Ron comms because she has an amazing face and I wanted to sort of get like her expressions and the way she sounds when

[00:04:22] she's laughing, even if she's not gonna. And some of them did sort of take on their own voices and all of a sudden like this person is much more of a major player than I was expecting. And that's always fun because you get a lot of plot generation

[00:05:41] out of stuff like that when your characters

[00:05:42] go a little bit rogue

[00:05:43] and decide to develop extra personality quirks

[00:05:46] and stuff like that.

[00:05:47] It's, you could really get a lot of mileage out of them didn't always see the beginning. I don't think I saw the beginning of A New Hope the first like four or five times I watched it. It was always one of those things where it's the middle or the end, right? You can't like like I don't think I saw the Tatooine parts for a while. So like, I'm like, I don't know why this this child is so sad. He just watched into the into the universe. Yeah.

[00:07:00] What was going back to Ahsoka a little bit? What was your knowledge of that character

[00:07:05] before you jumped into the novel? like it's gonna be Ahsoka. I should finish The Clone Wars. So I did. And then by the time I started writing the book, we were halfway through season two of Rebels. That's why I watched The Clone Wars because I wanted to watch Rebels. That's right. I had a lot of catch up to do. So I plowed through the first season of Rebels and then watch season two of Rebels live. Then I got the Ahsoka parts of

[00:08:22] that as well. It basically got the part where like, how did you develop this intermittent version of her? I think that's where my career as a fan fiction author comes in handy. Because I'm very good at like putting characters out of their, if you'll excuse the term canon

[00:09:42] timeline, like at different points.

[00:09:44] And so like, giving hints about whole thing with Hondo. And they were like, yeah, you can't have either of those characters. And so I was like, fine, I guess. And then I pretty much said, like, you're gonna have to tell me how she gets her crystals then, because I think Dave has like an idea. And so Dave was like, she gets them from an Inquisitor. Right. And so we went back to

[00:11:03] building the book. And at the time, so basically of the Jedi came out in episode six, which is called Life and Death, there are a lot of elements from your book incorporated into Ahsoka's past. So how did that feel as a creator, seeing your story actually animated and brought to life? I think that's one of the cool things about working for Star Wars

[00:12:21] is that it is always such a collaborative experience,

[00:12:24] but at the same time,

[00:12:25] you don't have to where you are today? So I got my master's in forensic archaeology and graduated in 2007, which was a really bad time to be applying to graduate school. It was a wonderful recession. And so I never did anything further academically. I was an archaeologist for a little while in Alberta, but it wasn't the kind of archaeology I really got good at writing that year, I feel like, which is also the year I wrote my first novel that got published. It was my third novel, but the other two are bad. And so I kind of made the change. And I feel like the difference between archaeology and writing a novel is not that different. In terms of making the

[00:15:01] jump in archaeology, you are't take all of my FF.net stuff over to AO3 because the FF.net stuff is real bad. So my word, and then I stopped uploading to FF.net because we up all the descriptions and like make everybody's banners and stuff and I also have to write my own story for it which I'm super far behind on and so it kind of got me used to thinking of writing as like something I blocked off time for which became quite useful when it was something I was doing as my second job and now that it's my only job it's definitely something like knowing how to

[00:17:44] block off that time is really useful. Did you ever envision fan fiction helps you get that inspiration. You know, sometimes you have, sometimes, I mean, at least for me, like I also, you know, enjoy writing. So at least for me, sometimes I have a hard time coming up with that initial idea. And sometimes fan fiction is great for that because you have a little bit of a structure to work with. So, you know, it lets you kind of have a springboard. So what advice would you have for fan fiction writers?

[00:19:01] I think for fan fiction writers, it's the same as regular writers or writers, if you will,

[00:20:03] but also find a hobby because you need something that's not your job. Right, and you know I never even thought of it that way. That's really a great point that you're

[00:20:08] writing fan fiction because obviously it's something you love. It's something that

[00:20:12] is inspiring you from something else, but majority of the time it's not your job. So what did you

[00:20:18] go into as far as hobbies when you started becoming a professional writer?

[00:20:22] Well as I said for a while I didn't have one and then I realized that reading was also my job. So You could have touched on this a little bit, but what advice would you have for people who want to turn their passions in general into a career? I think one of the things that's the most important is if you're coming up with a side hustle or if you are making something your job is to make sure that you're willing to lose it in some way.

[00:21:42] Like if it's something that you do for fun,

[00:21:46] once it becomes your job,

[00:21:47] you're not gonna be doing it for fun anymore.

[00:21:48] It becomes a little bit more stressful.