Finally! And yet...

So Christopher Paolini, someone who's books I've been reading since the first one was published (2003), has finally announced the fourth and final book in the Inheritance Cycle. It's called Inheritance. (I...really wish I was kidding with that title, but I'm not. It's official.) After years of waiting for him to even announce the title and cover and tentative due date, he just splurges it out there today and it's everywhere.

Now, when I first read his writing, I was 13. My Auntie Carrie gave it to me for Christmas in 2003, and told me how she thought of me and how I could do exactly what he did (get published successfully at a young age). I looked to him as inspiration from that moment, and absolutely LOVED Eragon. I loved everything about it, the characters, the concept of dragon riders (I was a huge fan of the Pern series at the time), and I was constantly drawing fan art for it all over. Its pretty much what jump started me starting SoF "for real", and I began to wonder about my own stories and how I could make them into something. A few years passed and the second one came out while I was 15. I bought it at once and sped through it- and noticed that the writing seemed... different. More advanced. I grew excited because of this, realizing that Chris had improved and how this, again, could be me. There were things I noticed in the book even at the age of 15 that I felt were off, like pacing and plot (and I HATED Arya. I still dislike her), but I shrugged them off because c'mon- dragons! And lots of betrayal!

Fast forward to 2008 and Brisingr comes out in all it's golden glory. And I'm now 18, almost finished writing my own books, and I pick up this story again, eagerly. And find out that not only has his writing style altered completely, but along with it, the characters are suddenly, without explanation, different. There was more life in them, more fire and personality, and suddenly I was plunged into 784 pages of character development and depth that should have been crafted in the very beginning. It felt like a completely different author had taken the helm of this book and was pouring themselves into it, unlike the first two. They paled in comparison, and as a result, it turned me sour against the story. Because now it was choppy, sloppy, inconsistent, and these characters I had invested five years of my life in where only now being developed. I was disappointed, and realized that this man who had written these books had made a drastic and terrible mistake.

He'd published the books before the story was ready.

What I read in Brisingr, the style and characters, was a different animal all together. It threw me off horribly, and while it is awesome that he grew, what he failed to realize was that he took his characters and story along with him, and in turn left the other two books behind. Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon when he was 15. He edited it once himself, his family then edited it, and then sent it off to his parents publishing company, who then got it picked up by Knopf, a major publishing company. Then it was spread all over, and he became a success, a marvel at his age (He was 20 at the time) and now millions of people are in love with this story. I have NO problem with anything I mentioned, because it's his story, if he wants to pump it out like this, then good for him. I still consider him remarkable, I just no longer consider his actions smart.

This author quickly went from one of my inspirations to a large, fat example of "do not do." Make no mistake, I will be pre-ordering my copy of the last book and most likely enjoy it. I do expect that it'll be totally different than the 3rd book, and I have little concern that I'll be wrong. The red, flaring warning signs I have taken from this near 10 year venture I've been on with these books, however, is that my first instinct, what I wanted to do at once, what people urge me to do all the time, is wrong. I cannot tell you how many times my family and friends hear that I've finished what I explain very clearly is a first draft, and they immediately respond with "So when will it be published?" This question used to stress me out, because then I'd walk away thinking "Yeah, when WILL it be published? I should write faster."

Which, for me (and in my opinion for any young author) is not at all the correct attitude. I feel that Chris was asked the same question and he turned to his parents and repeated it, and they published his book as a result. I'm not degrading the success he has, or saying that he's an idiot. In fact, he taught me a valuable lesson- to wait. I would sit and stew over SoF and pump out draft after draft of crap (will you believe that Kanaray used to have the power to shape shift into a small black cat? As in, HOUSE cat size. That poor boy.) and start to panic because I wasn't anywhere near complete. I had my family tell me how I could be published, how I should be, and would flip out because I wasn't. Now I look at my books and think "Slow and steady wins the race." Because guess what- it's taken me 4 years of writing to complete the first "complete" round of drafts, and now it may only take me 8 months to write both book 1 and 2. It's taken me 12 long years to get to this point where I feel confident about my writing and happy with slivers of my writing style. I don't feel I'm completely "there" yet, but I feel like I'm on the brink of it instead of miles away.

And I don't want to be like Christopher Paolini. I don't want my novels to jump styles and feel like different people are trying to write the same story and totally not succeeding. I don't want to be an astonishingly young author when these stories get published. I don't want them to just fall into someone's lap. I've grown so much in writing these books, and still am as I rewrite them, and I could rewrite them until the end of my life and learn something new each time- but I want to get them to a point where I know that this is the story I wanted told. That I don't have to suddenly develop characters in book 3, because they've been growing with the story this entire time. I think about the difference between him and me all the time. He didn't wait until his story was ready (if he had, it would all flow, all be in the advanced style he now uses.) He didn't even wait until he had the second book written before he published the first. And I think, for him, it was a mistake. At least from my point of view, because now these published books all feel so different to me and I can't enjoy them as the one story they are supposed to be.

Its just interesting to see him go through these books, and it'll definitely be interesting to see how he concludes this story. I learned a lot from these books, both when I loved the writing and even when I outgrew it. I'm still learning from them.

Oh, and to all my friends who have heard me say this before-

I TOLD you the last dragon (and the cover) was going to be green.

:)