Tell us about how you came to write two books about your character?

They came to me and asked me if I wanted to write a book and I said, "Absolutely." I had spent the last five or six years before that time studying screenwriting and writing screenplays.

I've always directed on the stage, I've spent half my life in the theatre acting and half directing. It's that work that I've done as a director in classical plays that that got me into [that]. You're not really re-writing Shakespeare, you cut a line here and there but you interpret it from a different mountain top. So it's a short hop to get from that to writing. No, it's an incredibly long hop because you're still dealing with great writing, whereas to create it and then interpret it [is more difficult].

I pitched about fifteen or sixteen shows to the Deep Space Nine writers, so they knew that I could think in terms of a beginning, middle and an end to a dramatic piece. I think that's why they sent Simon and Schuster [publishers] to me to see if I wanted to write something, because they didn't have very many Klingon orientated books at that point.

It took me a long time to write the outline, which was about sixty something pages for the two books [The Left Hand of Destiny, parts one and two]. [It was] a very detailed, beat-by-beat outline of what the story was going to be, which I developed over time with the editor, Marco Palmeri. Then I wrote the manuscripts in about six months.

They said, "Well, you know in a first draft there's a lot of things that need to be rewritten." I said, "I don't have time, I have a two year old now," and they said, "Would you mind working with somebody else to get it done?" I said, "Absolutely, let's get these out there", so that's when Jeffrey Lane came in.

He's a brilliant writer and I said, "God, if you can get Jeffrey to work on this I'd be ecstatic!" So Jeffrey came in, did a brilliant job of rewrites and revisions and changed very few things really. We got it done in a hurry. We've got nothing but great reviews from everybody, practically.

When it was all done I went away from it for a while, came back and I read it and said, "This is good, this is the heck of an adventure." It completed a lot of thoughts that were set up by Ron Moore about my character. Well, forwarded them, anyway.