hammer and tongs

I should have known something was up when a dumpster was dropped off in the driveway next door.  The old and small houses on our street are giving way, slowly but surely, to $900K mini-mansions.  Our neighborhood in Arlington is close to the city, so the lots are narrow and the new houses only have one way to go... up.  Some of the torn-down cottages have been replaced by houses that appear to have four full stories.  Not sure how they get away with that.  At least our 80-year-old willow oaks are still taller.

The neighbors are just putting on a first-floor addition in back, but with electrics saws, hammers, nail-guns, and jackhammers on concrete, it sounds like their crew is rebuilding the World Trade Center.  All within 50 feet of my desk.  Good thing I'm not writing today.

But now that I've cast novel #1 to its online fate, I need to dust off my outline for the sequel.  Or maybe it's a prequel, since most of the action takes place in the decades before 1924.  The only Swain's Lock character involved is Zimmerman, the aging heroin addict/dealer, who plays the antagonist in the sequel, which for now is called BURYING ZIMMERMAN.

Z's story unfolds along with that of the protagonist during an evening-long heroin-buying encounter they have in a stranded canal boat on the wrecked C&O Canal, after the 1924 flood.  I plan on writing BZ in first-person present tense from the protagonist's viewpoint.  He's stalking Zimmerman, who he considers an accomplice in the 1902 killing of his brother.  But Z is as slippery as a fish.

I wrote SWAIN'S LOCK in third-person viewpoint, with occasional cinematic perspective and zero authorial omniscience.  While doing that I thought writing in first person would be easy.  Now I feel the opposite.  In first person, you have license to jump around in time, but you can't fill the page with extraneous atmospherics.  Every observation from a first-person narrator has to really hit its mark.

I'll find out how difficult that proves, but not until I finish researching my eras and settings and then flesh out my outline.  And that will take a few more weeks or months, at least.

Anyone else out there consider first-person perspective challenging in a novel?