Plot Luck : San Clemente writer Jay Gummerman takes his ideas where he can find them. His first novel, for example, has its roots in a freak accident he heard about.

As a short-story writer, Jay Gummerman never knows where inspiration will turn up.

With “Chez Chance,” his first novel, it was hearing about a young Orange County phone company tree trimmer who was paralyzed in a fall from a palm tree after being startled by a rat.

“It was something that when I heard it, I thought, ‘That’s a really horrible thing,’ ” says Gummerman, 38, of San Clemente. “Later on, it kind of percolated up to my writer’s consciousness.”

The unlucky tree trimmer became Frank Eastman, the paraplegic protagonist of “Chez Chance” (Pantheon; $21). After his accident, Eastman is convinced of the arbitrary nature of the universe and resigns himself to “simply let the tide of everydayness take him where it went.”

As the novel opens, the wheelchair-bound Eastman has spent six months recuperating back home in Missouri and has returned to Los Angeles, where he was injured.

At the airport he links up with the offbeat Violet Moonier, a small-time country singer who lives in Orange County. When she mentions that she grew up near Disneyland, Eastman impulsively says that that’s where he’s headed, and Violet’s Mercedes-driving, Italian-suited real estate broker brother (“the most enabled person Eastman had ever seen”) reluctantly agrees to give him a lift to Anaheim.

Eastman checks into a courtyard motel near Disneyland where “the blue-eyed nuclear families who had come here in the ‘50s” have given way to an assortment of druggies and misfits, and the swimming pool “had been packed full of dirt and planted with night-blooming cacti whose overwrought perfume couldn’t mask some baser, underlying smell that Eastman tried to ignore.” It’s in the faded environs surrounding the Magic Kingdom that Eastman, as Publishers Weekly says, “wrestles with the implications of his personal predicament and with the conflicting, sometimes hallucinatory, realities of this strange milieu.”

Reviews for “Chez Chance” have been mixed: Publishers Weekly praised Gummerman’s “witty, melancholic first novel,” citing his “lean but expressive prose.” The New York Times was also impressed by Gummerman’s “graceful and sharp” prose and his adroitness “at giving us the face of the place” but countered by saying “he would have made a good book even better by showing us its heart.”

Novelist Bret Eaton Ellis, chiming in from the pages of Vogue, calls it “a deadpan lackadaisical comedy” that is “impeccably written,” but says Gummerman is so entranced by the offbeatness of his characters “that the book collapses under its own slight weight.”

Gummerman is a 1988 graduate of UC Irvine’s Master of Fine Arts program in writing whose acclaimed first book, “We Find Ourselves in Moontown,” was a collection of short stories written for his MFA thesis and published by Knopf in 1989.

When he’s not writing, Gummerman--whose wife, Kelly Main, is a San Clemente city planner--teaches fiction workshops and composition labs part time at UC Irvine.

A Whittier native who grew up in Manhattan Beach and earned a bachelor’s degree in business computer science from Humboldt State University, Gummerman has been writing short stories since high school.

“I like their elliptical quality--they leave a lot to the reader’s imagination--and I guess maybe I’m impatient,” he says. “I like the feeling of something that’s condensed down to its essentials. Sometimes when I read novels, I think the writing’s kind of flabby.”

Gummerman, in fact, began writing “Chez Chance” as a short story. But while most short stories are 15 to 20 typed pages long, Gummerman found himself 35 pages into the story and nowhere near the end.

“I was taking a lot of time describing the scenery and the setting and I had a lot to say about that,” he says. “I guess the normal MO for writing [short] stories--they’ve got a stricter form to them--is you’ve got to move ahead with the action, plot or characterizations, and that wasn’t happening.”

Gummerman says he never plans out his writing in advance and had no idea he would wind up writing about the area around Disneyland. He simply began the story by having Eastman landing at Los Angeles International Airport, where he encounters the colorful Violet, who is based on a local country singer he once saw at an Orange County club.

“When Eastman sees her, she has little Jiminy Crickets embossed on her red cowboy boots. I knew that was a resonate detail in the story,” he says. He wasn’t sure how it would resonate, but then he found Violet saying she grew up near Disneyland, and Eastman, who views himself as a “wild card” since his accident and needing “to pair up with someone or something or he wouldn’t pass back into existence,” lies and says that’s where he’s going.

Explains Gummerman: “That’s a big part of creating art, juxtaposing of things.”

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In moving his characters down the freeway to Anaheim, Gummerman remembered reading a newspaper article in which Disneyland employees referred to the surrounding melange of gas stations, coffee shops and vintage motels as Realityland.

Gummerman, who spent time soaking up the atmosphere around Harbor Boulevard, says he was intrigued by this paradoxical setting, “a rundown area right next to a place where everything is supposedly so ideal.”

When Gummerman finished “Chez Chance” after a year and a half he had 165 manuscript pages. And because he had a contract with Pantheon for a short story collection, he turned in “Chez Chance” with the intention that it would be published as a novella accompanied by three of his short stories.

But after reading “Chez Chance,” Gummerman says, his editor decided to strike a new deal and publish it as a novel. (Like short-story collections, Gummerman says, publishers view novellas as less salable in the marketplace than novels.)

In the past, Gummerman had always resisted tackling a novel--”you’re stuck writing the same thing for a long period of time”--but he concedes writing in the longer form “loosened me up as a writer.”

But even with “Chez Chance” behind him, he says, “I still don’t consider myself expert in any way in writing a novel. I really do think of this, in a way, as a long [short] story: It’s continuous time and one single character point of view, so it’s not doing a lot of things that typical novels do.”

He is now working on more short stories to fulfill his Pantheon contract for a new collection.

But that’s not to say he would resist writing another novel if he finds one of his stories growing beyond the short-story limit.

“I’ve learned the hard way that to dictate in advance what I’m going to write is a mistake,” he says. “To me, it’s all figuring out what my subconscious wants to write about. It could take this form, it could take that form: The more you consciously say ‘this’ is what I’m writing, a lot of times it tightens you up; it restricts you in a certain way.”