I spent about an hour staring at a blinking cursor Sunday morning, typing something, deleting it, typing something different, deleting it, typing something almost the same, deleting it (you get the picture, right?). I procrastinated by hanging up new artwork over my desk (things like this and this from my undergraduate stint at the Geometry Center) and finding a new desktop image (the Orion Nebula from the Hubble site) and setting up my playlist for the new book.

Then I spent an hour writing the first page of Circus Galacticus in third-person, struggling to find my main character’s voice and persona. Then I went on a hike with Bob and Charlie, and came back and ditched it all, and restarted in first person. As of Monday’s writing session I have over 2.5K words and my main character is alive in my head. She is developing characteristic ways of speaking, and quirks and flaws and strengths.

It’s funny, because I never really liked first-person as a kid. I turned away from books written in it. I liked third-person, which felt like the “proper” mode to tell a story in. I wrote my own first four (now trunked) novels in third-person. Now, I would bet at least half the books I read are first-person, including some of my favorites. And Fortune’s Folly and Mirable Chalice are both told from a first-person point of view.

With this new project, I thought perhaps I was getting stuck in a rut, that maybe I ought to try third again and see if I could make it work. What I discovered this weekend is that no, this book wants to be first-person. And if that’s what works, that’s what I’m going to do.

But beginnings are hard. The possibilities can be paralyzing, until you just take a deep breath and leap, and remind yourself you can always change it later.