Word: paolini
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...expects home-schooled kids to be a little odd, and Paolini is--just a little. He's handsome and slight of build, with messy dark hair and glasses; people say he looks like Harry Potter. His voice is on the high side, and he tends to overarticulate. It would be only slightly unfair to compare him with the Simpsons character Martin Prince. His hobbies include making his own medieval weaponry. "I've been working on a chain-mail hauberk," he says, walking in the mountains above his parents' house. (He carries a wooden stick in case he runs into...
...hatches into a beautiful, powerful and somewhat sassy blue dragoness named Saphira with whom Eragon forms a telepathic bond. It's an irresistible premise: she's exactly the kind of perfect friend a smart, lonely mountain boy would invent for himself, although Paolini doesn't feel as though he missed out on anything growing up in Montana. "I don't think I'd have written anything like I did if I didn't live here, if I'd been engaged in a lot of other, scripted activities--soccer and football and whatever else the case might be," he says. Take...
Being a prodigy isn't always easy. When Paolini's parents realized they had a teen Tolkien on their hands, they quit their jobs, published Eragon themselves and put Paolini on a grueling tour schedule, from junior high to junior high, library to library. He became the family breadwinner. "As the saying goes, we really bet the farm," Paolini says. "It was down to the point where if we didn't sell enough books, we didn't have food on the table." Isn't that a lot of pressure for a teenager? "You have no idea," Paolini says. "Even though...
Needless to say, now that Knopf has taken over the franchise, Paolini won't have to put his wizard robes back on anytime soon. Knopf is printing 1.3 million copies of Eldest, a book that significantly expands and enriches Paolini's fictional palette, adding new points of view--including that of Eragon's cousin Roran--and expanding Eragon's emotional range as he struggles against his archnemesis, the evil wizard-king Galbatorix. It's one of those tricky middle novels of a planned trilogy, a dark second act à la The Empire Strikes Back, full of reversals and repercussions...
After Eldest, the next stop for Eragon will be Hollywood. A movie, featuring John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons, is in production for a scheduled 2006 release. As for Paolini, he has no plans to go to college at this point or even to start going on dates. He's going to keep doing what he has been doing for the past six years: writing from breakfast till an hour before dinner, seven days a week, every week of the year except for Christmas, until the adventure is overfor him as much as for Eragon. "If I wrote a book where...