User blog:Brandon Rhea/New Short Story: My Mother's Dreams

Hey everyone. It's been a long time since I've written anything but I've just posted a new short story called My Mother's Dreams. You can see the story itself here. (Fair warning: this story contains spoilers for the ending of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.)

I was recently inspired to start writing again after not writing for a really long time. I have a couple of original (non-Star Wars) ideas in my head that I need to think about and develop more, but in the meantime I wanted to flex that writing muscle once more and see if I'd gotten rusty. To do that and to go forward, I felt like I had to go backwards a little. Because I'm still thinking about my own original stories, I decided to go back to my roots in Star Wars and write a story about Leia.

This was an idea that I had in my head for a few months. It was sparked when Greg Rucka, the author of an actual comic called Star Wars: Shattered Empire, talked about how he wrote a scene where Leia spoke to Mon Mothma. Rucka realized in writing the scene that there was a story out there where Mon Mothma would tell Leia about Padmé. He realized this after remembering that Mothma and Padmé were friends and allies in the Senate. Rucka said he thought someone would write that story some day, because he wasn't. When I read that I thought, "I want to write that story."

My Mother's Dreams is my take on how that conversation might have went. I also knew that I wanted to anchor it to something, so I chose a very specific scene at the end of The Force Awakens where I thought Leia might think back to that time she talked to Mon Mothma about her mother.

I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think!