Dragons and Jewels and Clichés

For some reason, people greatly prefer to read about the failures of authors, as opposed to their successes, so let me tell you about the very first novel I ever started. This was back when I was nineteen or twenty. The novel was set in a place called the Starlands, and concerned the Dragon Stone, a stolen Jewel of Power™. The dragons decided to get it back, and asked the Ravenards, a family of spies and thieves, to help them in this endeavor.

Had I extrapolated this, it might have been workable, but unfortunately I was still in fantasy cliché territory. I wrote thirty pages about how the Dragon Stone (my title for the book, btw) accidentally fell into the hands of a half-elven apprentice mage who just happened to be the bastard son of the late king (he was killed by the Ravenards so they could steal the DS). Along with a blind girl (who would later turn out to be a prophet), a half-breed unicorn and two other thieves, one of whom was the host for a demon, our apprentice mage, who labored under the name "Marcus Rainsummer", was going to travel across the land to the Dragon Heights, tailed by the Ravenards and by a weredragon who wanted the Stone for himself. I actually had the names of the next two novels in the series - The Darkland Quest and The Demon's Bane.

So what was good about the story?

• It introduced the Ravenards - I had never thought deeply about them or about their culture until that point.
• Blind people - or handicapped people, for that matter - are rare in fantasy.
• It introduced Falith, the aging Prince of Dragons, whom I liked. We so rarely see dragons who are old and worried about keeping their possessions and their status. Plus, I had a great fight scene in mind for Falith at the end (with the weredragon).

And why is this deathless prose not currently in print?

• There already exists a novel called The Dragonstone. I was crushed when I saw this book in the store - there went The Darkland Quest and The Demon's Bane as well.
• The "mismatched group of people set out on a journey to correct some wrong" is a cliché of fantasy. This doesn't mean that it's wrong to use this plot, just that it's not original. And I want to be as original as possible.
• I hadn't done any research, and it showed. I had no idea how a medieval castle was guarded, how shipping and trade were handled, even how the throne was handed down from generation to generation. That's why, for the novels I wrote subsequently, I did all the research I could.
• My magic was unoriginal. That requires either more imagination or less reliance on magic.
• The plot was soap operatic. The whole dark-secrets, illegitimate-son and dramatic-fight-to-the-death-scene might have belonged in a TSR novel, but I don't want to be a mote of dust on TSR's coat-tails.

And that's the story of "The Dragon Stone". Every author should be so lucky as to stop after only thirty pages of crap.