Christopher Paolini
Topic: Books
In case you haven't heard of this guy, he wrote his first book when he was 15 (started it, at least), called Eragon. It was a fantasy genre thingy inspired by his favorite authors on the subject.

By chance, it fell into the hands of a big hotshot and the book blew up. The guy just came out with the sequel (he's like 21 now I think) and it's number 21 in sales over at Amazon. It's all over the stands in Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Which made me go, "Damn, that's awesome! This guy is my hero."

Until I read some reviews by people "in the genre" and I read a few pages of the thing myself.

Turns out it's cliche as hell and the writing is cheesy. How can a 15-year-old be expected to write about love or death or pain or anything really real that is supposed to make up these kinds of books?

The answer is he can't and didn't. Most reviewers say it's damn good...for a 17-year-old (it took him a while, it's a long ass book, they both are - which in itself is impressive).

But anyway, instead of being my hero, the kid now serves to show me that, damn, a 15-year-old sat down one day and worked on a book for years and eventually came up with a 700-page story that a lot of people are buying.

Whatever people want to say about the quality of his writing, you gotta give him respect for doing it.

Also, I read in an interview that he's going to finish out this trilogy and then he wants to write about other things - to expand beyond the genre of fantasy fiction. I feel his pain - this is not going to be easy. But give him a star for trying.