From Embers Read Free Page B

fantasy stories I'll be writing for the next two decades. And then in the spring of 1998, a couple months before I graduated high school, my dad accepted a job in Little Rock, Arkansas.
    His new employers wanted him right away, but after a little negotiation he convinced them to wait until the end of the school year to make it easier on the kids. Not a lot easier, mind you. I walked across the stage at my graduation on a Friday night, shook the principal's hand and accepted my diploma, then slipped out the side door and into the waiting moving truck.
    That move was probably the hardest for me. I had a lot more connections to sever and a lot more plans to interrupt than I had in the past. And, worse, I had another move looming up just a couple months later. I knew I'd be heading to Oklahoma City for college, so it seemed such a waste to move to Arkansas for three short months.
    If all that angst sounds a little melodramatic...well, there are two things to consider. 1) I was eighteen. If teenagers aren't melodramatic, they aren't conscious. 2) I was wrestling with some pretty serious but undiagnosed social anxiety. I've talked about that a little bit on my blog . It's nothing crippling, but just bad enough that I hated having to meet new people. And a move always meant meeting new people.
    We'd barely been in Little Rock a week before my parents hosted a big dinner party to get to know some of the families from Dad's work. After enough whining and complaining, I convinced Mom to let me spend the evening hiding in my room. They told everyone I was sick. I was, in a sense.
    But that's how I found myself trapped upstairs, feeling miserable and wrestling with a world in turmoil, and quietly worrying that it was all going to be just as bad all over again when I went off to college in August. I was also bored and stuck there for at least two or three hours before the last of the guests left. I didn't have a TV or computer in my room, but I didn't really need one. I grabbed my scribblebook and started writing a story.
    I wanted excitement and conflict and drama right off the bat, and by some flash of inspiration, I decided I wanted to show a happy home life torn asunder (go figure). I wanted to show a stable, pleasant world turned upside down and torn apart. And that, quite honestly, is where the dragonswarm came from: a melodramatic teenager hiding from a dinner party.
    That night, sprawled on my bed, I wrote the prologue. I ruined a perfectly pleasant spring day for dear Ms. Elsa, I established the premise of the dragonswarm, and then I rolled right into chapter one and really got down to business. Now it was a teenage boy's life getting upset as he was called away to study at a school that wouldn't be nice to him. The words flowed like water. It all came so easily. It still took months to write, but once I considered it done, I started sharing it with friends and family.
    When autumn rolled around I went off to school and had a pretty good time, all things considered. After a couple years of training I did a handful of extensive rewrites on the story and stripped out some of the melodrama and most of the autobiography. I also cut the prologue, because it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual story.
    Eventually I split that initial book into two volumes (which became Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm ). Then much later (about a week before publishing each of those), I completely rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. And all that hard work was certainly worth it! I published Taming Fire and it built a massive audience in a matter of months. When I released The Dragonswarm it jumped straight to the top of the fantasy bestseller list. But there's very little in the published works that remains from the story I wrote in that scribblebook way back when.
    That was more than a decade ago. And the funny thing is, I can't count how many times over the years one of those friends or family members approached me to ask, "Hey...what