New Books Announced to Fill the Gaps Between Episode VI and Episode VII

Sorry, I do not have a link to an article at the moment but it has been announced that there will be twenty new books to be released, I believe starting in August, that will fill the gaps in the new canon and explain to all of us what has happened between ROTJ and now.  From a marketing standpoint, clearly this move is brilliant.  I would be willing to bet that there are some Star Wars fans out there who were never all that interested in the EU but will be reading some of these books to prepare themselves for the new movie and find out what has been happening. 

I think under different circumstances, I would be excited about this.  To be honest, with the way I'm worrying about what they are doing with this movie now, I'm actually kind of dreading it.  And I probably won't be reading any of them before the movie comes out, although that would've been true whether I was feeling cynical about it or not.  I still want the movie itself to be sort of a surprise.  Which reminds me to remind all of you, please do not discuss spoilers in any of the comments.  You are free to link to anything as long as you warn us and don't mention any specifics, but for those of us who don't want to know, don't just blurt anything out.  Although from what I understand, while rumors are flying left and right, nothing at this point can be confirmed anyway, so you may believe something you read, but it may be completely false. 

I don't know why, recently I've been a lot more concerned with what they are going to do with these movies.  I feel as though they are going to almost go out of their way to make it incredibly different from the EU as it was before.  I guess that gives them more room to "play" but at the same time, so much of what happened in the original EU (what are we calling it now?) took the character arcs from the movies and brought them to their natural progressions.  Han and Leia got married and had kids.  Luke started a Jedi academy and trained the next generation of Jedi.  Leia became a real leader, Han maintained a strong presence with the New Republic.  The Empire didn't completely disappear but they also were no longer in power.  If you change those things, you basically are telling me that the end of ROTJ was a complete lie.  Just kidding!  They're smiling now, but really the Empire is still very much a big deal and Han hasn't changed at all and will go back to his old life and Luke is going to disappear and Leia is just going to continue to be a miserable, alone woman serving for the greater good.  Fooled you!  It'd be like if the prequels had come out first, and then when ANH came out the Empire totally hadn't gotten anywhere and Vader wasn't that big of a deal as a villain. 

Sigh.  Please don't ruin my favorite movies for me for the rest of my life.  I could let the prequels go and pretend they don't exist because they were all different people and a whole different thing and we already knew how that turned out anyway.  These are my favorite movie characters and I'm just really concerned that they are going to completely tarnish them.  I'm not feeling particularly optimistic. 

As a final note, Episode VIII has a release date of May 26th, 2017.  And the first spinoff movie will be titled Rogue One, and I believe will center on the beginnings of Rogue Squadron.  I am completely indifferent right now to the announcement of Episode VIII's release date, because if Episode VII destroys my love of Star Wars, I really won't care.  A Rogue Squadron movie could be cool I guess, and has a lot less potential to have elements that send me into nerd rage.  Although I have to admit, the fact that we're apparently going to be getting a new Star Wars movie like, every 6 months, seems a little... excessive almost.  Can they make them all worth watching?  Is it going to feel more like when we get into the late seasons of TV shows and they are running out of ideas and the quality really suffers?  So many questions.  I'm curious to hear all of your thoughts on this.