If at first you don't succeed....
Mood:  lucky
Now Playing: "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
Topic: 2008

"Guys are jerks" is not the first line of my new novel.

I don't know that I've found the first line yet.

I couldn't sleep last night (jet lag as a result of returning home from six days in L.A.? or caffeine from a Mountain Dew??) and so got up and wrote out the idea for a new story and then took a look at my most recent beginning to the novel.  I ended up deciding that the first person beginning I'd done a few weeks back was no good and started over from a different point in time and in the third person.  It takes longer for me to write in the third person and I was up until 2:00 a.m. just getting three pages down.

I like what I wrote, but I'm pretty certain that those three pages are not the beginning of the novel either.  Third person point of view affords me the ability to have an omniscient narrator which could be very cool, but it won't achieve the tone I want.  It's hard to be bitchy in third person.  So I will likely have to begin again in first.  (Second person present tense is an unlikely possibility - I have two short stories written from that perspective - but I don't see myself being able to sustain it for the length of a novel or it being the right vehicle for this story.)

I'm hoping that the next beginning will be the last beginning (at least long enough to get a first draft written!), but none of the writing I've done previously has been wasted.  Each of these beginnings has the potential to be developed into a short story, and I have learned more about what my novel is about each time I think I have begun it.  This time, I really, really think I have a skeleton structure, some good notes, and a strong overarching theme that will tie the multiple story elements together.  Now I just have to remember all of these things long enough to get the thing down on paper and find a way to create some momentum....