Setting: Sometime in November 2004, a bookstore somewhere in southern Ontario, Canada. Amy sees a Star Wars book she doesn't own yet. This is a rare event, and more often than not, an event that prompts her to take action to prevent such an event from reoccuring (at least until the next book comes out). The book is called Republic Commando: Hard Contact. Amy isn't particularly interested in it, but she buys it since she tends to read all Star Wars books regardless of quality.
However, Amy had just started re-reading the Jedi Apprentice series and was quite busy at school, so the book sat on her shelf, unread.
Fast forward to mid-March 2005. Amy receives her shiny new Star Wars Insider Issue #81 magazine in the mail. While reading through it, she sees a short story called Omega Squad: Targets. The first thing that drew her eye was the gorgeous drawings of extremely leet-looking commandos. Then she sees the author is someone named "Karen Traviss" and thinks to herself, "ooo, a female Star Wars writer! cool!". The story was long, but Amy read it. She didn't understand everything the first time and had a really hard time keeping the characters straight, but on the whole, enjoyed it muchly.
Then she remembered the book on her shelf. Amy found the book, and quickly discovered that the commando squad from the short story is the same one as in the book! Amy immediately starts reading the book. After a week, she's done... and extremely enthused. She writes in her blog: "Star Wars Republic Commando: Hard Contact is one of the best SW books I've read. Ever."
In the meantime, Amy visits the Republic Commando game's official website, looks around for a bit, and discovers that the squad in the game is a different one than in the book. She thinks that's cool. Amy also starts visiting the forums at TheForce.net, for the first time in years. She finds two threads of interest, and reads them both in their entirety: Hard Contact and Alpha, the ARC Troopers, and the Commandos. Since Amy had previously fell in love with the ARC Troopers in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoons (and she even runs a fanlisting for them!), it didn't take much for her admiration of the ARCs and the Commandos to extend to the clones in general.
Shortly after, Amy downloaded the Republic Commando game demo. She knew that she normally doesn't like first-person-shooter type games, but since she's had fun with SW ones in the past, she thought she'd give the game a chance. And she was impressed. She made her brother play the demo, and shortly after she bought the full game and started playing it on Easy difficulty. By mid-April 2005, she has completed the game.
Only one month has passed since reading the story in Insider, yet Amy's free time will never be the same. Especially when she recreated Omega Squad in The Sims 2. :) And once she downloaded the game's soundtrack, her music playlist is much different as well!
Before April is out, Amy has replayed the game (on Medium difficulty this time) and re-read the book (the latter in only three days). And in fact, her new clone enthusiasm has rekindled her love of Star Wars generally. She looks forward to Episode III with renewed anticipation!
One cute entry from her livejournal, dated April 28, 2005: "Something is happening to me. I went to type 'command' and I typed 'commando' instead. ^_^"
The release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith only intensified Amy's enthusiasm with Star Wars in general, and clones in particular. She began to love Jango Fett, Boba Fett, and the Mandalorians as well (also aided by the awesome Mandalorians in Knights of the Old Republic II). In July 2005, she began reading Star Wars comics for the first time, and was immediately drawn to the ARC Trooper Alpha (whom she had heard a lot about).
After many months of waiting, Amy received her copy of Republic Commando: Triple Zero the day it came out - February 28, 2006 - and had finished the book by March 1... all within a 28 hour period. True Colors was devoured in a longer timeframe due to scheduling conflicts (work should stop when new RepCom novels come out, seriously!) but with equal enthusiasm. She now patiently waits for the next and final RC book, oh so painfully far in the future. :)
The story of Amy and the Commandos will be updated periodically, as it is still unfolding. It's far from over, peoples! :D
On the off-chance anyone's interested, here's some more general info about me.