Oh, hell, yeah, Flipside! I can't read Eddings at all. Someone needs to jab him in the head with an icepick. There's a chance they'll kill all the braincells associated with Sparhawc.
You know, there's a difference between a "series" (say, George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Fire and Ice') and shamelessly trotting out an old whore in new makeup (anything by Lackey, McCafferey, etc).
If I can reduce your story to a formula, you're doing something horribly wrong. Pern and most Mercedes Lackey and a few others:
$angsty_teen meets and bonds with $strange_animal with [magical|scientifically-enchanged] powers. $angsty_teen learns error of [his|her] ways and goes on to became critical to the survival of [his|her] $geopolitical_unit. In many cases, $angsty_teen is recast as $powerful_and_dangerous_but_really_kind_hero before all is said and done.
There. That's most Pern and most Valdemar books. There's fomula for urban fantasy (that evil cult contributed to by Lackey, Hamilton, and their ilk).
I challenge you to find that sort of formula for ANY well written series. Lets take a look at the top of one of my bookshelves. We'll use just the top, front row of my book shelf. Each shelf is stacked two high and two deep and there's eight shelves, plus several large boxes of books. Here's a very short list of good, non-formulaic SERIES:
the Lord of the Rings, Chronicals of Narnia, His Dark Materials, The Crown of Stars, The Coldfire Trilogy, The Mageworlds books, the Kushiel series, The Bench novels, Memory Sorrow and Thorn, the Chung Kuo books, the Heritege Universe books, the Manifold series, the Xeelee Sequence, the Heechee saga, the Expendable books, Otherland, or the the Neuromancer trilogy.
If that many authors can manage to write that many stories without descending into formulaic drudgering, I contend that Lackey and McCaffery and their ilk are doing something horribly, painfully wrong.
