Karen Traviss keeps busy in the Star Wars universe. As one of the trio of authors telling the epic Legacy of the Force series, Traviss will write books two, five and eight of the series. The second book, Bloodlines, debuts in paperback today.

In addition to her Legacy duties, she has recently penned A Practical Man, a Boba Fett e-novella available for download here. Also, she has signed on to add two more novels to her Republic Commando series of books, scheduled for release in August 2007 and August 2008.

Despite this busy schedule, she recently took time out to answer questions related to Bloodlines. Here's what she had to offer.

Bloodlines is the second novel in the Legacy of the Force storyline, a nine-book arc that picks up several years after the defeat of the Yuuzhan Vong. The Yuuzhan Vong were an external threat, from outside the galaxy. This time the threat to the Jedi and the Republic comes from within, both literally and figuratively, with a rebellion centered at Corellia that threatens civil war not only across the Republic but in the Solo and Skywalker clans, and Jacen's disturbing embrace of the dark side. Did you and the other writers, Aaron Allston and Troy Denning, work out the plot of this arc together? What considerations led you to make the choices you made, and what degree of input and control was there from the folks at LucasBooks?

It's a classic team effort. We sat in a meeting room at the Lucasfilm offices at Big Rock Ranch in California for a day -- I flew out from the UK specially for the meeting -- and we didn't finish until we had a complete story arc that covered nine books. Much tea and choc chip muffins were consumed, I can tell you. The whole gang brainstormed -- LFL Licensing people, Del Rey, and authors -- and kicked ideas around: then it all went on a whiteboard and we sliced it nine ways. And I begged LFL to let me bring back Boba, so I was utterly delighted when they said yes.

It's the opposite end of the spectrum from the way I tackled the Republic Commando novels, which were virgin territory, and I was the only one writing them. I like that variety in my working day. I really enjoy kicking stuff around with other creatives, and everyone now knows I'm a retcon addict. Retcon is retroactive continuity -- the science of making stuff fit and getting better stories out of it. Retconning isn't about changing existing continuity: it's about taking seemingly contradictory issues that coexist in continuity already, due to errors or oversights, or even gaps, and finding a way to make it all work together, so that no piece of the continuity is ignored. Forget Sudoku and Rubik's cubes -- retcon is my Olympic mental gymnastics of choice.

At the end of the previous novel, Betrayal, Jacen Solo has just killed a fellow Jedi in cold blood and embarked on the path to becoming a Sith master under the tutelage of Lumiya, an old adversary from Luke's past. It must be a fascinating challenge for you to attempt a sympathetic portrayal of a Jedi's corruption, especially with Jacen believing that he is only doing what is necessary to bring peace and order to the galaxy.

I don't aim for sympathetic or unsympathetic, actually: I aim for real, and even with a character that isn't built by me -- when I create characters, I build them from the ground up with a psych profile -- I let them do the living and the talking. How does a clever, morally aware man go down the path that Jacen does? By self-delusion and self- justification. Jacen already has a high opinion of his powers and judgment, and that's not misplaced: the man is good at his work. But he just disconnects from the outside world once too often and starts to see himself as having this mission to save the galaxy, and only he can do it...you watch the drift from good intentions to what he sees as necessary evils to all-out self-justification. Sadly, in my previous careers -- as a journalist and later a spin doc working with politicians -- I saw that very human pattern of behavior time after time after time. And I can watch it now in politicians in my own UK government: I won't get too political here, but the capacity of those with power to make themselves believe in their own purity of purpose even when it's obvious to those around them that they're going bad and beyond bad is staggering to behold. They really do shift into a parallel world that only they can see, and shut out all dissent as they focus on what they want it believe and hear. Some of them start out corrupt and opportunistic, and some get sucked into it.

Getting into Jacen Solo's head was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever had. When I write, it's very tight third person POV -- there's no narrator. It's all the characters' own voices, seeing the world as they see it with no real help from me, and I just report what they see. Letting go in order to do that is very much like method acting, actors have told me. You become that character for the time being. And boy, was it scary being Jacen. It all seems utterly logical and inevitable to him -- and, like all people who do terrible things, he has no sense of his own evil.

A wise friend described the slide into a personal delusional hell like Jacen's as stemming from a deep-down belief that you're the focus of the universe about which everyone else's destiny pivots. And, of course, that's exactly what Jacen thinks: only he can save the galaxy.

I was so freaked by being in his head that when I switched point-of-view characters, I wanted to launder my brain. It was so easy a trap to slip into. Anyone could do it in the right circumstances. That's what makes evil -- if we can use that value-laden word -- so dangerous. It's not rare, handed only to demons; it's lurking in all of us, and it's pretty banal.