A comment I see a lot in reviews of my work is "why did you write in first person, especially since you're not a girl?" This has a lot to do with my golf game.
I am a bad golfer, and carry a 20+ stroke handicap. (For you non-golfers, this means what I should do in 72 strokes I do in over 100). Part of that is because I spend a lot of my golfing time in the woods, rough, sandtrap and generally everywhere but the fairway. So, I've developed a certain ability to get myself out of trouble.
When I started writing
The Mars Run, my ignorance of writing was Rumsfeldian. I didn't know what I didn't know.
I figured that, if Caesar could pull off first person, ("I came, I saw, I conquered") so could I. As far as a female heroine, well I'd seen this story enough with boys, so I decided to change it up. Thus, I spent the last few years hacking my way back to the fairway.
In that, I was helped immeasurably by Christopher John Farley's novel
Kingston By Starlight. It's based on the true story of Ann Bonney, a female pirate of the 1720s who was spared from hanging because she was pregnant.
Farley took those bare facts (all we know of her) and created a suspenseful "memoir" in first person. It's what my book wants to be when it grows up.