I am finally happy with the beginning of my young adult novel. I’ve been struggling with the framing device of the protagonist telling the story to his grandson, which is my homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, as I mentioned in an earlier post. Typically for me, the solution came when I just followed the natural path of the story. In this instance, it was something I’ve never done: Use the second person.

I never considered using the second person so overtly. I guess it is the framing device used in The Princess Bride, although I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know for certain. But the way my book starts feels a lot like the beginning of the movie version.

Anyway, I find it interesting that in the two novels I’m writing, I’m using atypical structures. In this novel, I’ve replaced a pure narrative with a second person conversation. In my mystery novel, I’m alternating chapters in different time frames. Both were done to fulfill the demands of the story, not because I like to experiment. I’m not an experimental stylist—I”m a slave to the story!

Anyway, here’s the beginning of my young adult novel. I think it works well.

The story begins with your great great grandfather’s cane, with its arcane carvings and its shiny brass tip. Yes, that means he was my grandfather, and yes, this is the same one, and no, you can’t touch it. Not yet, at least. Now no more questions for now. I haven’t even started.

If you take a look at the novel writing box in the lower right of my home page you’ll see that I’m writing two novels. A third person mystery novel for adults and a first person young adult urban fantasy novel. It’s not too hard to alternate between the two in terms of mood and vibe, but there is one difficulty that I’ll need to assess: I’m having trouble with the first person point-of-view of the young adult piece. My guess is that this has more to do with writing in first person than alternating from third to first.

The mystery novel is told in various close third person narratives, and I find that a very comfortable medium to write in for me. Writing in first person has proven to be more difficult, at least at novel length. I’ve written short stories in first person, but they are more experiential and scene-based, and that is much easier for me to grasp in first person, I’m guessing.

The reason I chose first person for the young adult piece is simple—I wanted to use a framing device as an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs. His fiction was a huge influence in terms of story telling when I was young. In The Land That Time Forgot he uses a framing device of a manuscript discovered in a bottle. As the narrator describes the situation of him finding the manuscript, he ends by saying the following, a bravura performance of storytelling:

You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting quotation marks—which are difficult of remembrance. In two minutes you will forget me.

“In two minutes you will forget me.” Such confidence in the story telling abilities the author must have, I remembered thinking. And, it is true, in two minutes I had forgotten that there was a narrator framing the story. It was a spectacular bit of writing that I never forgot for the rest of my life.

I badly wanted to write something similar—and putting modesty aside—I wanted to duplicate the effect. In short, I wanted to create a nominal framing device that would be forgotten “in two minutes” due to the power of the story telling. So I started to write my young adult novel in this way. But I feel it is simply not working.

Actually, as I wrote the above I feel like I need to be more overt about stealing from the master—he started his novel not with the framing device, but with the story itself. He then pulled himself out to the narrator’s story in finding the manuscript, and then he plunged back into the story. I started with the framing device and then plunged into the story. I think what I’ll do next is move from homage to outright theft and do what Edgar Rice Burroughs did—start in scene, move out to the narrator, and then dive back in.

If that doesn’t work, I’m planning on just giving up and writing it as a straight third person piece. If that happens I’ll know that some mountains simply aren’t meant for me to climb!

As you can see from my poker blog, I had attempted a fun experiment: To see if I could start with zero money and make it to $60,000 from just online poker. I believe my overall process was spot on and doable: Start by winning money in a sit’n'go or freeroll tournament and then use those winnings to play cash tables. There were two problems with this:

1) Tournaments are susceptible to luck.

• It’s not an accident that Emmanuel Lasker and Garry Kasparov were world chess champions for years: They were head-and-shoulders above every player around them. There is very little luck involved in competitive chess at a very high level.
• You don’t see this in poker. Even the great players don’t dominate like you see in other individual sports. Winning the World Series of Poker three years in a row? Nearly impossible, even for incredibly talented players.

2) Cash tables are incredibly boring

• Right now, I bet I could win $100 to $200 a day just playing the low stakes tables in online poker rooms. But there is a big problem: I find cash games incredibly boring. All it really takes is patience and discipline. So you sit there minute after minute, hour after hour, just mindlessly turning cards over, and the few moments of excitement are anti-climactic–you either get hit with a bad beat or you win a big pot off of the really poor players at the table.

As a result, I just couldn’t continue with this experiment. It was alternately frustrating and boring. Winning a freeroll takes a tremendous amount of luck, and my whole idea was to minimize luck with knowledge. Unfortunately, in chess tournaments, it is extremely hard to minimize luck.

This means that I’m going to drastically curtail my poker play, making my poker site somewhat irrelevant. I’ll keep it up for the occasional poker post and update, but my attention now is going to be aimed at something more interesting: Writing.

I’ve decided to work on my three current projects, pretty much simultaneously: My mystery novel, my science fiction novel, and my Twitter novel. Over the next few weeks I’ll set up a way to track these via this or other websites.

As I mention numerous times on this blog, this is a standard situation for me–my life is a series of tangents that I follow and then abandon (e.g. poker) when I get bored. I then follow the current of my life in some new direction. And that new direction now is writing.

I tend to cash my random business and assorted other checks at a small store and check cashing place near our apartment. I went there today to cash a $50 check in online poker winnings. The person behind the counter generally is always there, and when he looked at the check, he asked me about it.

I told him, “Oh, that’s just poker winnings.”

To which he replied, “You cash the coolest checks!” I asked him what he meant, and he pointed out that last month I brought in a royalty check from sales of my novel. I replied that normally I just bring in expense checks from my job, and he laughed and said, “Expense checks are cool, too!”

I was telling Lea about the conversation, and she commented that it does appear I live this total jet set life–I’m cashing checks from sales of my novel and my poker winnings in between all those expense checks from my travels.

If only it were that glamorous.

I just thought of a great idea. I get a tremendous amount of positive and constructive feedback from my writer’s group here in Dallas (Stone Soup). Much of it is in the form of handwritten notes on copies of my chapters. Instead of re-writing chapter five, I’ll go through and use the Microsoft review application to add the notes to my chapter. Then I’ll move on to writing chapter six.

Later, when I’m ready to re-write chapter five, all of the old notes will be right there to remind me as I tackle the chapter again. I may do this for the future from now on. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of forward momentum. I’m starting to think that the Stephen King method is ideal: Be writing one novel while you’re re-writing and editing another.