Reed Hansen asked Brian Jay Jones:

How do you select topics for your books?

Brian Jay Jones It can vary. Sometimes, your topic finds YOU. I sort of "backed into" Washington Irving -- I was reading about the origins of Christmas traditions, where I learned that Irving had pretty much made most of them up, but swore with a straight face that they were all real. That was news to me, so I read all of Irving's Christmas stories -- and then everything else he had written -- and was amazed by his voice and attitude. I loved his stuff so much that I wanted to know more about him . . . and discovered there hadn't been a biography of him in more than eight decades. So, he became my subject.

With Jim Henson, that was another one that was sort of a happy accident. I had somehow ended up on his wikipedia page and went down to the very bottom of the article to see what books were being cited in the article. What I found was that while there were plenty of books about his work, there was no real biography. That was surprising to me -- I'm a Sesame Street/Muppet Show/Jim Henson kid, and couldn't believe there wasn't a biography even twenty years after his death. That was the start of a two year conversation with the Henson family about writing Jim's story, with access to their private archives.

Finally, with George Lucas, there was a moment when I was working on the Jim Henson biography and got to the section on Labyrinth -- a project Lucas produced for Henson. There was a photo I used in the book of the two of them together, and I thought -- for just a moment -- "Wow, Lucas would be a GREAT project to do next!" then got back to the book at hand. But the moment the Jim Henson biography was published (in late 2013), I was already working a proposal for a George Lucas biography (which I was saving on my computer under a file called PROJECT NEW HOPE).

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