Michael Chabon was just your not-so-average literary wonder boy trying to splashily follow up his phenomenally successful debut, 1988's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, with a great second novel.

After all, from the moment Chabon discovered his gift for writing, at 13, Chabon penned a story about Sherlock Homes meeting Captain Nemo, and he was hooked.

“It wasn't that hard,” he says. “I had fun doing it, and I got all this praise and attention.”

A mere decade later, while completing his master's in fine arts at UC Irvine, Chabon became the toast of the publishing world with the release of Mysteries, which, although intended as his thesis, touched off an intense bidding war. (William Morrow ultimately plunked down ＄155,000.)

And, if critics were to be believed, he had the goods. Finally, they exclaimed, a literate young writer, someone more concerned with craft than attitude.

Unlike other authors of his age, Chabon embraced, rather than scorned, the power of words and language; his writing was lively, funny, involving, beautiful, the kind of stuff from which great literature is made.

Turning the pages of most first novels, says Douglas Stumpf, an editor who worked with Chabon on both Mysteries and his new Wonder Boys (Villard), is like “turning lead.” But Mysteries has a “rare magic quality that really pulls you in.”

Despite the praise accorded his first novel, “I wasn't confident about it.” Chabon, 31, said recently over lunch near his Los Angeles home. “I never really had a chance with it to even think that I was writing this book to be read by the public.”

With his second novel, Chabon thought, he would really slay 'em; he would move beyond the snotty-young-author ghetto that sheltered the Bretts and Jays and Tamas, and never look back.

He also wanted to write a book that was more personal.

So with a big fat advance from Villard in his pocket, Chabon embarked on his second novel a long, frustrating and ultimately fruitless journey to a place called “Fountain City,” which he says, “was sort of a map of my brain.”

It covered lots of ground, perhaps too much. Chabon attempted to incorporate several of his passions into one novel: Paris, Florida, architecture and baseball. But after 4 1/2 years, four drafts and more than 600 pages, he was no closer to finishing than when he began.

Without telling anyone, he finally gave up in early 1993, while living in San Francisco. Using his wife's decision to take an early bar exam as incentive, he began anew. But the prospect of starting from scratch terrified him.

“When I dropped ‘Fountain City’ and started to write Wonder Boys, that was really the scariest thing I've ever done. I was so afraid of [messing] up again.”

Using his frustration—and fear—as inspiration, Chabon cranked out his first draft of Wonder Boys in seven months; by March, 1994, the great second novel was at last a fait accompli.

The story, in part, concerns a faded, pot-addicted wonder boy named Grady Tripp, a writer who clings to what could have been as he watches hopelessly—a detached observer in his own downward spiral—as his never-finished masterpiece Wonder Boys and his entire life crumble and flit away like fall leaves caught in a breeze.

On many levels, Chabon could relate. During the “Fountain City” experience, he says, “I started to think, ‘Oh, my God, I'm going to become one of those writers that I have heard about who are working on the same book for 10 years.’

“Then I started thinking, ‘Well, what would that be like? Who does it happen to and why does it happen?’”

Although Wonder Boys isn't the autobiographical brain map that Chabon had initially hoped, it's probably just as well, if only for the preservation of his sanity.

When Chabon ditched Fountain City for Wonder Boys, he returned to the familiar terrain of Pittsburgh. While the city retains a warm spot in his heart (he attended college there and his father still lives there), Chabon, after time spent in Key West, Seattle, San Francisco, the mid Houston Valley and Laguna Beach recently moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Ayelet, a federal public defender. Their daughter, Sophie, was born shortly after they arrived.

But Chabon hasn't been spotted carousing around Hollywood. He digs his work, his family and baseball, and that's enough for him.

Actually, an extra mouth to feed gave Chabon an additional impetus to work. He's just completed a screenplay, a comedy called Gentleman Host, that's been optioned by Scott Rudin at Paramount Studios, who has also purchased the rights to Wonder Boys.

Screenplays may be just a paycheck to Chabon, but his fiction remains sacrosanct. “I would never consider writing fiction for money, he says.