Susan Vaught lives with her family and her many pets (including a very bossy parrot) on a small poultry farm in Western Kentucky. She works as Director of Psychological Services at a state psychiatric hospital, and spends her evenings and weekends furiously scribbling and typing life into novels, short stories, and poems. She has written a number of fantasies for young adults, including the award-winning and historical Stormwitch and the epic Oathbreaker books: Assassin’s Apprentice and Prince Among Killers, co-authored with her son JB Redmond. She has also written Trigger, Big Fat Manifesto, Exposed, and Going Underground, all contemporary novels drawing from her experiences and her work as a neuropsychologist. Her upcoming contemporary release from Bloomsbury USA, Freaks Like Us, will hit the shelves in September 2012.
Description
This is one essay from the anthology Secrets of the Dragon Riders
Millions of readers adore Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle: its earnest hero, its breathtaking battles and, of course, its awe-inspiring dragon Saphira. But there’s so much more to the series than meets the eye—and Secrets of the Dragon Riders, edited by today’s second hottest dragon-writer James A. Owen, shows readers what they’re missing.
Why might Roran be the real hero of the Inheritance Cycle? What does Paolini’s writing have in common with role-play games and modern action films? Are teenage writers judged more harshly than their adult counterparts? The YA authors in Secrets of the Dragon Riders—some of them no older than Paolini when he wrote Eragon—each take on a different aspect of the series to engage and entertain Paolini fans.
About the Author
James A. Owen is the author and illustrator of the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica—which includes Here, There Be Dragons, The Search for the Red Dragon and The Indigo King—as well as the Starchild comic series. He lives and works in northeastern Arizona.