An Author's Announcement:

I don't write in contests. I don't participate in online group writing challenges. I don't particularly care for being judged and controlled, and plus, deadlines are such a bother (understatement: I think they are demons specifically created to torment absent-minded types like me). But I've never, ever, ever been able to resist a personal challenge or dare. …Unless it's given with the aim of exploiting that particular personality quirk and manipulating me, in which case my native contrariness obligates me to refuse. Anyway.

When I was first writing my AU novelization of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, one of my reviewers, Razor T McCutchn said that they'd like to see me try to write its sequel. At the time, I replied that I had no intention of doing so. While I'd played the game, I didn't own it, and I didn't particularly like the storyline. There are inconsistencies. Questions that aren't ever answered.

And as a whole, The Sith Lords leans too much on Revan, and her (yes, I don't care about the strategy guide or the EU novel, Revan was a woman!) big reasons behind her "fall" to the Dark Side, and her continued heroism decades into her life. I've mentioned before- I think one of the major weaknesses of the Star Wars universe is its insistence that its heroes go on hero-ing. It doesn't work like that. People fight in one war. They die, or they live, and if they live, they cope with their scars and move on. Revan is amazing, but I think she deserved that. And also, I think to say that the Sith Lords were just too big and bad for Revan is to belittle her fall, and to say that she "fell" and invaded the Republic to save the galaxy from the True Sith (as some do say), and went back to the Unknown Regions to fight the True Sith threat after the Jedi Civil War (as is indisputable from TSL) is to make her too big, too unbelievable of a heroine, and incapable of becoming corrupted by her power, intoxicated with her arrogance, and contemptuous of the weak Republic and the do-nothing Jedi Order.

I fixed that in The Edge of Light and Dark. I wrote the True Sith out of existence. My Revan fell, got her mind wiped, set her head on straight and fixed the mess she'd made. And sue me, she got a semi-realistic, happy ending. And when Razor T McCutchn asked about a sequel, I knew I was going to write the story that way. So I replied that no, I didn't think I'd be writing The Sith Lords. I like my prequels to leave actual room for a sequel. But then, God help me, Razor T McCutchn messaged me back and used the word "challenge".

My brain fired up immediately. How would I address the problems in The Sith Lords? How could I connect the two games? How could I answer the unanswered questions in a way that satisfied me? These questions, and others, lurked in the back of my mind for weeks, and then, a few days before I finished The Edge of Light and Dark, an Exile character sprang into my head. And it was all over. She's actually in the epilogue. Darden Leona. Named after a town in the Green Rider series by the remarkable Kristen Britain, and a lion. I don't know why, but it fit her. And she worked her way into my AU universe where she definitely didn't belong, and did what she starts in TSL. She rebuilt the Jedi Order.

Well, I thought, that wouldn't work. So I got the game. And I started to play it. And yes, the problems were still there. But amidst the unreality of the Revan frame, I found myself struck by the reality of the pain in the Exile's backstory. The brutality that Revan is supposed to have displayed in the Mandalorian Wars the Exile actually enacted. But she's actually a very peaceful person. The guilt Revan was able to forget haunts the Exile every day. And she never rests. She drifts from planet to planet, never finding home, and, when she finally returns five years after the Jedi Civil War, hunted by just about everyone for being the last of an Order she doesn't belong to anymore. All her friends are dead. All her kind is dead. And all her allies, to some extent, are untrustworthy. Yet she trusts them, and running a million light-years a minute, still manages to make sense out of nonsense, restart the Jedi Order, triumph over evil, and, most of all, to make peace with herself.

I thought, there is a story I can write here. But it turned out to be much more difficult than I'd anticipated, and to take a much longer time to take time out of my rapidly changing life to write a very different story. I have now been working on the KotOR II novelization on and off for two years.

So if you were a fan of Edge of Light and Dark, or perhaps if you still are, I'd like to invite you over to my new story Defining the Jedi, a sequel. Postings are every Monday and Thursday while I'm 30 chapters ahead of you all. If I come up with block at the end of the story and can't work it out in time, I'll slow the schedule to once a week until I can.

You'll find I've changed the AU semi-realistic, happy ending of Edge of Light and Dark so the happily ever after is not quite so certain. After all, Aithne has undergone some serious trauma, and perhaps more traumatically, she's forgotten all about it. That's not something you bounce back from in a day, and unfortunately for the people that love her, Aithne didn't. She spent a little over a year with Carth, tormented by foggy, half-memories always out of focus, cognizant of some terrible threat of she knew not what, and desperately trying to live as 'Aithne' under Revan's shadow. And then she left, to seek out the threat she couldn't remember, and under the mistaken belief that it would give her loved ones some room to breathe, away from the ambiguity of her reputation.

Defining the Jedi takes up the tale five years later, a year after the events of KotOR II. Darden Leona has finally found Revan, and she endeavors to explain to her what she has done and learned. You will find the True Sith are still gone. I still don't like them, and I still think Revan needs to give up heroics and get on with her life. This changes KotOR II's storyline in some places. I hope you will still find Defining the Jedi worth a read.

If you don't, though, or if you liked the original ending, I've posted this story's original epilogue as a one shot. You can find it on my page, along with Defining the Jedi.

As ever, May the Force be with You,

LMSharp