We’ve had quite the past few months over here at The Author Conservatory!

• S.D. Smith, bestselling author of the Green Embers series, came and spent an hour visiting with our students last month (February 2022).
• Andrew Peterson, bestselling author of the Wingfeather Saga, has agreed to visit our students again next month (April 2022).
• And Christopher Paolini, New York Times bestselling author of The Inheritance Cycle, will be visiting at the end of this month (March 2022).

If you aren’t familiar with Christopher Paolini, he’s one of the biggest teen author success stories in history.

He started writing his debut novel, Eragon, when he was only fifteen-years-old. He published the book around the same time he turned eighteen, and by the age of nineteen, he was a New York Times-bestselling author.

The series has now sold over 35 million copies.

And he’s actually in the Guinness book of world records for being the youngest author of a bestselling book series.

And just as relevant for many of our students, he did all of this as a homeschooler!

As he puts it: “Homeschooling gave me the opportunity to pursue my own interests, time to dream, and time to write. And I had freedoms the majority of today’s teens don’t have. I didn’t have to contend with peer pressure to conform to social fads. I could be myself. Without the frantic schedule kept by many teens, I had time to think, to daydream about adventures, to create the world of Alagaésia.”

We can’t wait to have him talk with our students about his experience writing a bestselling series as a homeschooled teenager.