Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, February 28, 2018, 11:17 a.m.

In 2017, I wrote two novels about a young stock-racing ace named Barrie Jarman. Of my seven novels to date, they are the only ones related to each other. I’ve often explained this by saying that once I’ve completed the arduous process of writing a novel, I’m ready for something else. Writing fiction is hard. I have to fall in love with a story to write it.

I spent twenty years writing about real stock-car racing. I traveled all over the country. The sport is now in decline, and I wanted to do something about it. Four years after that chapter in my career ended, I started missing it, and I started reflecting about how it had changed and how it had gone astray in terms of popularity with the general public.

Barrie Jarman became my version of what the sport needed. I created him as a hybrid between the likable rogues who populated NASCAR when I began writing regularly about it and the kids I write about now who play football, basketball, baseball, and other sports.

Lightning in a Bottle and Life Gets Complicated were also the first novels I wrote in anything other than third person. Charlie Jarman, Barrie’s uncle, tells the stories, which are written in an informal, conversational style. Barrie comes to live with Uncle Charlie because he and his father do not get along. Jim Jarman has a drinking problem, and it fuels Barrie’s resentment. When he moves from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to a cabin behind Charlie’s house in Lacewell Rapids, North Carolina, his lifestyle is as wild as his talent. He and his buddies have grown accustomed to arriving home from the dirt track and partying till dawn, drinking beer and smoking pot while Barrie picks up his guitar and howls at the moon.

Uncle Charlie becomes his steadying influence. He’s his uncle, not his daddy. He doesn’t tell him what to do. When Barrie asks for his guidance, he provides it. Charlie helps him hone both his talent and his work ethic. Charlie is an old hand in FASCAR, which is what the ruling body of stock car racing is in the novels. He opens doors for the boy. He greases the wheels of his career in a low-key, patient way. Charlie directs him on the track as his spotter, and drives his motor coach to and from the races. He lets Barrie learn the lessons on his own.

Barrie’s a stock car racer, but he could be a ballplayer, or a musician, both of which he is on the side. He’s an impetuous, headstrong, rebellious kid who needs the direction he gets from Uncle Charlie. He gets in and out of trouble in both novels, but, in Life Gets Complicated, success goes to his head a bit. New rites of passage teach him new lessons. He pays a painful price for his mistakes.

I’ve always wanted my novels to be funnier than they are. They’re amusing. Writing in first person through Charlie’s eyes taught me how to be funny. If you read the Barrie Jarman adventures, you’ll laugh out loud whether you’re a stock-car fan or not.

For the past few days, I’ve been reviewing the audio version of Lightning in a Bottle, and I feel fortunate that a narrator named Jay Harper has perfectly captured the spirit of the story. He’s made me laugh out loud at my own words. He is Charlie Jarman. I hope we can get together on an audio version of the sequel.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the eighth novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, published. It’s a political crime thriller with a theme as contemporary as last night’s news. Its scope gets wider and wider as a group of people stumble unwittingly into forces far beyond their control.

I’m already getting started on another novel that I’m writing in first person. It’s about baseball, and the narrator grows out of the main character of one of the short stories in my collection, Longer Songs.

Writing it is a return to the irreverent style of the Barrie Jarman adventures, and the plan is to write it while I’m attending real baseball games and writing about them. I don’t have a title yet.

I just have a spirit.

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