Fuelin’ Around with Deadly Driver’s J.K.Kelly

J.K. Kelly - Author for JK Kelly Books

Author James Patterson gave JK some sound advice, “Give readers what they want,” and since his debut novel through to his latest, SPY DRIVER, he has striven to do just that.

Contact: J.K. Kelly at Visit Online!

           

• Recorded ON-SITE at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in York Springs, PA
• Normally we would start a Break/Fix episode by asking people for their superhero origin story, the who/what/where/when and how they came to be the petrol-head that they are. But in your case, much of that is outlined in your first book “Fuelin’ Around” – so let’s rewind the clock a bit, and talk about your passion for cars. Was there something as a kid that got you interested? Did you come from a racing family? Was going to racing events a past-time? Was there a particular car that imprinted on you and attracted you to this world?
• You went to Penn State for journalism, at that time, what were your career goals? How did you end up on the other side of the fence, finding yourself involved in photographing and writing about race teams? The journey from photography/journalism to VP Fuels 
• Let’s talk more about writing a book as compared to journalism. Many people say “I’d love to write a book” but it all becomes very real when you sit down at the screen and start a journey of 85,000 words.
• I’ve read Deadly Driver, it’s an arrive & drive, jump in, strap down and go! type of read. You’re thrown directly into the action on Page 1. Lots of fun and a great introduction to the world of Motorsports, especially Formula 1. It comes at a great time because of all the hype and interest surrounding shows like Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” 
• Why Formula 1? Are you an F1 fan? Let’s talk about Bryce a bit – people might be thinking, how plausible is a F1 driver + Super Spy combo?
• Throughout the book there are tons of twists and turns which keeps the reader waiting for the next apex… but there’s also many nods to VP fuels and others throughout the story, some obvious, others not so much.
• The flow of the book grabs you right away, the first 3 chapters really set the stage and then about every other chapter for the next 12 or so, you interleave the exposition in there as flashbacks. It reminds me of how TV shows can easily do that to keep us engaged. Could you see Deadly Driver moving into a screenplay? 

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports related.

While studying journalism at Penn State University, our guest traveled to auto races on the weekends where he took photos, he was able to sell to racing magazines. One of his editors suggested you are taking the pictures, so write the feature stories that go. After a stint with the Darrell Waltrip, Gatorade number 88 NASCAR team, he spent the next 30 years traveling the world for VP racing fuels.

But that passion for writing never left him Following the advice of James Patterson who said, give the readers what they want. Six novels later from his debut title, found in time to his accounts on the road with VP in Fuel and. Through his latest thriller, deadly Driver, author, JK Kelly has driven to do just that.

And we wanna welcome JK to break fix, to [00:01:00] share his story. And we’re here onsite with him at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in York Springs, not far from where he lives, so he can share his story with us. So welcome to the show, JK Ira. How are you? So normally we would start a break fix episode by asy people for their superhero origin story.

The who, what, where, when, and how they came into the petrol head world. What they’re all. But in your case, most of that is outlined in your book Fueling Around. So let’s rewind the clock a bit. Talk about your passionate cars. It’s an interesting story for me, hopefully for other people too. I grew up in a funeral home.

Not many people know that. And not many people can brag or boast or shabb, Mely say that’s what happened. But for me, I grew up in a funeral home, had all the strange occurrences that everybody would always ask me about. What’s it like growing up there, et cetera, et cetera. But for me, the beauty of it was as I got older and I got into cars, I realized that what we had sitting in our garage were a couple big block Cadillac hearses and limousines.

Once I got my license, my job was to keep the cars clean, fueled up, ready to [00:02:00] go. A lot of it was during one of the gas crisis back in the day, so I would always be sitting at the gas line with everybody else. Sitting there idling with a big old Cadillac Hearst. Then all of a sudden I found myself doing a little drag racing, street racing at night.

In the hearse, in the hearse, in the Hearst. The beauty of it was, you know, as I got my license, I now could do a lot of good things where I would use the limousine, meet girls, pick up girls, they’d cool, they’d drive around Cadillac limo. So I’d use the limo for one thing and I’d have the hearst for racing.

And it wasn’t a tall friend of the family, a local police officer caught speeding. He said, you better tell your dad, or I’m going to. So I did. My father said, look, two. Take the name off the side of the hearse, we don’t need that name. Apply it through red lights and crashing and doing any of that other stuff.

And also, we don’t need any of the bad negatives come from that. Just be safe. So I realized, okay, I can’t be sold around in those couple of us thought that getting a 19 73 74 Plymouth Fury, old state police car, Pennsylvania, they had the four 40 s. Exhaust. They were badass as far as we were concerned.

It’s thought about buying one of those and [00:03:00] instead talked my father into Kid Moise, station wagon, right? Laity bought that. All of a sudden the two barrel was gone. New intake from metal rock, four bell carburetor, do exhaust, et cetera, et cetera. That opportunity afforded me a lot of cool things to do with cars, but the beauty of this was I got a side job working at Upper Arby High School, after hours as a janitor, met all these other guys.

Same mindset as. In time, they start taking me to race, go to the N H R Race, Englishtown, New Jersey. I went to the NASCAR race of Pocono and once I got to the race, I fell in the sport. Just fell in love with it. My original passion for law enforcement got shot in the head because I found that my eyes would not pass any of the eye tests.

We had friends at the FBI Academy, we had friends, police forces, et cetera, et cetera. So the funeral and bottom line, If your eyes can’t pass the test, there’s nothing we can do about our connections. I always was into storytelling. I love telling stories. I shifted from a law enforcement major to journalism major.

That’s [00:04:00] where you picked up at the beginning. I wound up going to races, taking pictures as a hobby, and someone said, ah, the photos are really good. Probably sell them. So I sent ’em Super Stock Magazine. They said, yeah, we’ll buy two or three of those and before you know it, they were giving me credential to go to the.

That’s when he one editor said, you know how to writes the right stories that go along with it. So that just played out. I was going to the races doing what I did, but then I realized that freelancing is not gonna pay the bills. I fell in up with nascar as I had said my dream job would be to work in nascar.

So I decided why I needed to get a full-time job. I’d called Charlotte Motor’s, Speedway said, you hiring anybody? Your PR patients office? And he said no. The key question that came up next was you didn’t know anybody that. And they said, we think die guard is give them a call called die guard. Three days later I was on a plane, flew down to Charlotte, had the interview.

They were one of the first incursions of Yankees into the South. Gardner Brothers were from Connecticut. They actually started using Bill [00:05:00] Grumpy Jenkins power to qualify at Daytona and do some other things. Another Yankee from where I run from in that area and they brought another Yankee in as their PR guy and I was there for a year.

Learned a lot, went to 34, 35 races, had a great time and righted end of that first year wall trip in the guard gardens, robbing a flight. He wanted to change his contractor. He wanted. It got weird in the shop. Some of the guys were pro Darryl, some of the guys were pro owner at that time. My wife decided, I don’t like Charlotte.

I’m this home. Both my parents countered cancer and said, we need your help. Opportunity or a sense of duty caused me to move back home. Worked in the funeral business for a little while. Uh, after a time when my Aaron’s both passed away, a friend of mine said, what are you gonna do now? I said, well, I don’t wanna be in the funeral business anymore.

It’s all I do them. And they said, , what do you wanna do? I said, I wanna get back and race. Well, we’ve got a spot of VP racing fields for you, brand new company, a few years old, and they asked me to run the [00:06:00] office that’s based in Chester, Pennsylvania. Took that over and then I spent the next 30 years there.

So let’s pause there a second. Let’s go back a little bit though. We asked our guests all the time, did you come from a racing family? Obviously you didn’t get from mortuary funeral directors. For many of us when we were younger, we imprint on a certain car. I don’t wanna say that the purse Was the car that got you excited to go to the track and go to racing.

Was there some sort of sports car? Was there something out there that you went, oh my God, that’s the most beautiful car in the world? At the time, I really fell for the Dodge Charger. I was very impressed with Richard Petty’s career. The first time I saw that card person not on tv. That Delow Orange that they had in the car.

Eddie Blue, his track record, his performance, the king of the sports, so to speak, and I was totally impressed with that. So I went out, bought Dodge Shark too. From there, she sent me to the racing fuel under things. Well, we went to English Taylor. I had never seen a nitro funny car before. And jungle. Jim Lieberman, who was from Pennsylvania, very close to where I grew up as well, he was there.

Bruce [00:07:00] Larson was there. All the local Pennsylvania heroes were there. All the touring guys were there. Once they led a Nitro. I was done. Didn’t matter to me what car? It was just the Nitro just got me going. OAL truck racing. The sound, the smell, the excitement. It was, it was a three ring circus and I fell for it.

They often say that you only need to see something about seven times before it really sticks memory. So back then, Richard Petty sponsored by S STP for almost forever. Another fuel comp. Think that was subliminal messaging or maybe some sort of serendipity carrying you to vp? No. It’s interesting you say that though, because the VP logo, if you really look.

If you take the outcroppings of the V and the P, cut them out. It looks like an oval shaped STP logo, the red, white, and blue of the logo. I don’t think at the time, I don’t know what was imprinted where, but after I left vp, I’ve still worked with them as a consultant for many years, and two years ago they asked me to write 50 year history of the company.

Company turns 51, 25, interviewing the founder who I knew very, very well for years. [00:08:00] We talked. Where the logo came from, where the name came from, et cetera, et cetera. So I don’t know about s Stcp being accredited in my head, but I do remember in elementary school somebody said, if you sends STP a self-addressed stamped envelope, they will mail you two STP ECAPs.

So everybody in the school did that. At the time, Andy Grant was sponsoring the indie cars. Everybody was watching Wide World Sports and the Indy five. And I could tell you that our school was plastered with S STP logos. They were everywhere. 30, 40 years later. Here I am making sure that the DP logo, similar logo is plastered everywhere in the world.

We wanted to put it in front of anybody and everybody. Getting on as many race cars, get the fuel on as many cars as you could, and make the company famous. That’s what we did. Let’s talk about your early days at vp. You know, there’s many people out there that are familiar with the VP logo. We’re talking about logos, and to your point, it’s everywhere.

I mean, I personally have 12 VP cans in my own garage and have different colors and styles, whatnot. Let’s start from the basics, kind of twofold. A, what does VP stand for, [00:09:00] but. You went from journalist to now being in fuel industry. What was that transition like and what did you do when you first got there?

The question about what the VP logo stands for, what the name stands for? It came from Volatile Products. That was what Burns came up with many, many years ago, back in 1975 in San Antonio. The actual name Volatile Products here on the very first design. Then after. A company name was actually VP Hydrocarbons that was on the logo as well.

And in time we removed that. Again, here we are as far as the transition from journalism to racing fuel. Pretty drastic jump. That’s really a tough one. I’ve always had an investigative mindset and that’s where the wanted to go into law enforcement came from. I didn’t want to be a beat cop and no disrespect to those guys, but I wanted to go after white collar criminals.

That was where my interest when I found out I couldn’t be in law enforce. On that side of it, journalism gave me the opportunity to become an investigator journalist. That’s where my mind went. I was so excited and so thrilled to be around racing. I really did put [00:10:00] that off to the side. So once I got an opportunity to, not so much leave the investigative journalism behind, cuz I did enjoy doing some stories.

Once I got to be in the circus to be a part of it, and not just sit in the grandstands, but to. Delivering fuel and talking to Jungle Jim Laman or John Forres, or going out to crappy Jenkins’ shop in Malvern, Pennsylvania, shitting the breeze with him for a little while, and sitting there while he did some di pools.

That was cool. That was the coolest thing he could do. And at the time, what I found also was trying to find people to come to work with us was so easy. If you told somebody who might have been a truck driver or a secretary or a warehouse worker, you get the opportunity to go to races on. You get an opportunity to meet all these different famous people, they just gravitated to it.

At any given time at the VP warehouse, whether it was in Chester or in the new facility, we built newer Delaware, you could have a pro circuit rig coming in to pick up fuel before they were heading to Southwick. You could have a road racing team coming in that was headed for testing [00:11:00] down at Summit Point or Daytona, wherever they might be.

It was a cool environment to be in. So you wrote fueling around before you left, right? I rode fueling around after I retired. There was an ownership change. I just saw that as an opportunity to just like I’d been a Philadelphia Eagle all my life and the transition to what to be a Dallas Cowboy was not necessarily in my mindset.

It’s not in my blood, so to speak. My daughter had just gotten pregnant with the first child, had her hands full and needed my help. My wife had had some health problems and had really curtailed some of the things we were. So all the stars aligned for me the same way they did that day. I called Charlotte Motor Speedway decades before and said, no, anybody that’s hiring, I think Fate just said, it’s time for me to do something different.

So I was still able to maintain my relationship with VP as a consultant. It gave me the full-time opportunity to work with my daughter, needed me, help my wife as well. And then everybody says, well, you’re retired. What are you gonna do? Play. I have no time for that stuff at all. So I just said, you know what?

I [00:12:00] wanna get back to writing before you know it. Six months later, my first novel was cracked out, found in time, and then everybody had said, you have such an interesting life. Had a great time. We wanna know more about it. So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to write a book about what I’d done. Was there some events or something that happened at BP that inspired you to write fueling around?

Or what is fueling around really based on somebody’s trying to figure it out for the first time? Who wants to pick it up? In one sense, I had told people who are interested in the business side of things, it shows people how we took a very, very small company, a company that only had about eight or nine employees when I started there, to where it is today, where it’s a global.

There’s some business lessons in there on how to approach things, how to attack people, how to do a SWOT analysis of the competition. You have to be self-aware if you’re gonna go to war with another company, to know where your strengths and weaknesses are, where your vulnerabilities are. And to a degree, it’s like playing chess.

If this company is gonna make this, take this series away, or they’re gonna entice an organization to change the fuel [00:13:00] regulations so that the VP products aren’t legal anymore, which. You gotta understand how to deal with those bombs that go off and how to work around in the book Fueling Around. I can tell you a quick story.

It’s in the book. Hell, everybody knows the off name if you grow up watching a Formula One races. They’re a French based company. They have since changed the name of total, but they decided they wanted to get bomb with motocross in America. BP was fueling everybody. We were winning all the championships at the time.

We were the go-to fuel for Super Cross motocross. He came over to the AMA and said, I’d like to sponsor. One of the series. The only thing we’d like to do in, in return for that is we would like you to adjust a specific gravity regulations. Can’t remember the numbers for sure, but at the time I think our C 12, which is the most popular fuel on the planet, particularly in two stroke motor cross racing, think the gravity was about seven 16 corrected at 60 degrees.

They talked the AMA into jacking it up to seven 18, which would accommodate one of their products, which happened to be oxygenated at the time. Ours. [00:14:00] And AMA took that deal. We said, all right. Hey chemist, what do you gotta do to jack the of gravity up? Seven 16 to seven 18 olds week, week later, our fuels are still legal.

I wake up waiting. Then when they brought the Oxygenator product, as I said, they turned around and spent six months developing a fuel. In a week’s time, we had something better. They’d go back to Soleis with the chemists. We’d eat this. We need something better. They’d bring a new fuel to Pro Circuit and all these other.

We’d see what they had done. All right, let’s go. We had asked the French to help us get away from the British back in 17 75, 76, and here we are, the son of a gun from France. It’s an incursion of our realm, so to speak. So we turned around and went head-to-head with them. We beat them down and set them home with the tails between their legs.

And years later I met the gentleman who was with EL at the time, who was running. Organization and he said, what amazed me about your company was it was so proactive and reactive. And I’ve been to the lab there where they have all these chemists. They [00:15:00] had more chemists than we had dog workers. And they said, you guys would turn around, make something better.

One or two of your guys would make something better in a week’s time that we had been working on for months. So I related some of those stories about how to. Obstacles. Yeah. Some you can’t, sometimes you can’t just beat the money. You can’t do so of it. But it’s wrapped in a work of fiction though, right?

It’s not just autobiography or autobiography. Sh around is an autobio. There’s not really any fiction in it at all. It, it went over very well, was a popular read and a lot of people have asked me to write a sequel and because I’m still doing what I’m doing, I’ve started something called Still Fueling Iran, but I don’t think that would come out for some time because I’m so busy writing the other novels.

Once you write one novel and you get a good response to it, people say, what’s what’s? Thrillers appeal to a much broader audience. A motor sports book appeals to a certain smaller group where you might enjoy telling your story. So I guess for most of us, we don’t realize how competitive the fuel industry is.

[00:16:00] There’s many other Pennsylvania based fuel companies as well. Bps not the only one. How did that play out? I mean, obviously you, you kind of ousted the French, but you still had Sunoco to deal with. You still have other people. VP is actually based in San Antonio. That’s where Steve Burns born and raised.

That’s where HQ. We opened, as I said, the plant in Chester, Pennsylvania, right up the road, or actually a little bit south of us in Uck was the Sunoco refinery. It was so funny that we were so close. We were enemy combatants. We were right there. I actually would run into some of the Sunoco higher ups at the local Home Depots.

We bump into each other while hecking up lumber, plywood, or whatever we’re doing for home improvements. We always had a friendly rivalry. If you go back into the seventies and early eighties when things were a little bit different, the people that ran the Suno division had told some of their distributors, you’re not even to talk.

Don’t fraternize. Don’t visit with them. Don’t talk to them. As things have changed, we hanging out. We can have a beer together at a bar during a trade show, during a race, and have a. It’s a rivalry, but we’re still friends. [00:17:00] Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk more about what it’s like to write a book prior to journalism.

Your background is steeped writing. Many people will say, like you have said, I, I would love to write a book, but it all becomes very, very real when you sit down at the screen and start your journey of 85,000 words, right? It’s very different than writing a blog post or a quick article for a magazine or something like that.

So how do you make that transition? Stepping away from fueling around, which is more non-fiction. How did you develop that wanting to write in the thriller genre especially? Well, thrillers always intrigued me. Whether it’s movies, television shows, books. A thrill is a thrill. I had always intrigued. I have a very vivid imagination.

That genre appealed to me. The first book I wrote, one was called Found in Time. It involved select Group of Marine Raiders going back in time to do submissions because on the history buff, the idea was what would happen if you could send them back to do certain things. Maybe you sent them back to be witnesses to.

With the idea or the understanding, they could not change it. If you know any Marines, if you put [00:18:00] them in a situation where they see something bad going down, they really struggle not to help not to get involved. Of course, that’s what happens. I set the guys back, they saw something happening. They can’t just stand by.

They get involved. Of course, I’ll help Quantum Leap. Yeah. Yeah, so the story, James Patterson, who I took his masterclass and I’ve met him and he gave me some great advice. He was always big on, you must do outlines, and I’ve never outlined. I just turned around and I’d start telling the story. I’m, they call a panther.

That’s I, I write by the seat of my pants. I’ll write a chapter. I kind of know where it’s going. But as the book of os, if you might have had an outline, you might have wanted to go this direction, but sometimes it just takes a natural organic feel where now it’s going over here and that’s where I go. I just follow wherever my.

Dream of consciousness, I believe they call it. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. So if you’re writing at two o’clock in the morning when you sat down at 10 o’clock, I think I’ll put a half hour in. Now it’s two o’clock in the morning. Your wife’s looking at you like, what are you doing? A laptop away. It is what it is.

Writers just write when they can. Something we [00:19:00] do, it’s in our blood. You’re writer yourself. You know what it’s all about. I at that cursor blinking sometimes. Where am I going from here? . But you know, it’s funny. A lot of people have said to me, I’d love to write a book. I’ve got the story I want to. , that’s great.

Sometimes just writing something, whether it’s a paragraph or an essay, or a short story or a novel, can be very freeing for someone. You can channel a lot of things, download a lot of things that maybe you’ve been carrying around backpack for a while, even if it’s in the subconscious. If you really wanna become a writer, if you wanna become a commercial writer and sell books and make money selling books, what you have to understand is who’s gonna wanna read this?

Who’s gonna want this? Has this story already been told. If you’re gonna go out and talk about some secret agent that’s gonna go do this or a Marine, he’s gonna go do that. Stories haven’t been told a million times. Guys like Jack Carr, James Bond, whole nother story. I’ve tried to tell stories that had not necessarily been told I was interested in the time travel thing, so I did that.

Did a sequel to it called The Lost Pulse. [00:20:00] They both did very well. Then I started into something else that involved an FBI agent who was disgraced work, get his mojo back then came deadly. Which we’re gonna get into here in a little bit. You’ve created this whole world, and I think that’s one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re putting together a disjointed series.

You have some sequels in there and sequels that you’re working on, but how did you sit down and kind of flush out all the persona? Do they come from your personal experiences or any of the characters based on people you know, or based on yourself? Let’s take Bryce Winters as an example. The main character in Deadly Driver, which we’re gonna expand upon a little bit more, or even, uh, Matt, Chris.

Those two main characters in two of your books, where did that come from? Where did those ideas come from? How do you flush out their voice and the way they think and things like that? Well, a, being a history buff that allows me to have studied people and study their, their stories, their biographies, there’s certain elements of certain people that interest me and I just peck and choose what seems to make sense to me.

For instance, price winners, character, and deadly. He is [00:21:00] an American kid who grew up in Vermont. He was playing with rally cars in the woods of Vermont. Something happens in the book. He decides it’s time to go track racing. He goes there, something happens there. He goes onto something else. But through that, I had always been an admirer of Mario Andretti.

I thought he was a spectacular racer. He’s done so many great things. Here’s another Pennsylvania boy transplanter from Italy, of course, having won Daytona Indy and then Formula One World Champ. In addition, all the other things that he did. I thought, that’s cool. There’s not many guys that are boast about that, about doing that.

And so I came up with a character who would be this homegrown kid who would work his way up through motor sports and pursue his idol, so to speak, runs on some folks that are putting him in the right cars, the right opportunity. He goes to the top. And you know, there’s a lot of similarities between Bryce’s origin story and Mario Andretti’s, especially with us here at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing.

You see a lot of displays of Mario Andretti here, where he got his star in dirt track [00:22:00] racing, sprint cars and whatnot. So it’s kind of funny. Bryce started in rally backwards of Vermont, and similar to Mario Andrei in that respect. So I think you’ve done a good job of encapsulating that. But in some ways, I think the bigger challenge isn’t the auxiliary characters, the supporting cast, his father, his uncle, all these other people that he’s interacting with, and how you paint those pictures and, and in talking to you offline, A lot of scenarios in the books actually come from True Stories, and we’ll dive into that a little bit more as we talk more about the book.

So I also want to ask before we make that transit, Outside of Patterson, who are some of the other authors that you admire or that influenced you to develop your style? Going back a few years, some of my favorite writers have been Tom Clancy. , but someone who really got me turned onto books was Dan Brown from the time he wrote the Da Vinci Code.

He wrote about four or five books after that. I read every single one of ’em and I read fast. I just fell in love with the way he wrote, the way he did, his characters, the way he developed his stories. Just one for the ride. I started to read a lot of James Patterson. [00:23:00] There was such a volume of books.

There was too many to read at Patterson. She’s got a bazillion out there. Once I got the idea in my mind that I wanted to write some, I encountered some editors who would do some work with. I’d set up some chapters that’d showed me, Ryan had lost my mind, where I had wandered off the reservation, so to speak, and they would show me how to come back in.

Ryan Stack is one of them, just came out with a book called Fields of Fire, which is getting great reviews. Ryan’s great editor, good friend. He’s helped me quite a way in developing my writing style. He was always a huge fan of Michael Crane. Mike gravitate towards his work and I was very fortunate to meet him the year before he passed away, and I’ve always kind of held other authors of, you know, Technical science fiction sort of world against his work.

For me, that’s always kind of the gold standard. I mean, you get the Dean KU and other people, you know, in that similar genre. But for me that’s what’s always influenced my writing is how do I pay the technical to the layperson? And that’s always the, that’s tough challenge. Tough. And I even have to do that in my day job.

So I guess we all pull our inspiration from different, And that was a [00:24:00] challenge that I faced when I wrote Deadly Driver. Everything I’ve ever done in Motorsports was always trying to entice other people who don’t know anything about racing to come try it, come check it out, come to the races. I had experience in carting, for instance, all my friends had drag cars.

They spent a fortune on their drag cars, fortune on their motors and a trailer, and at the end of the day I bust on them. Okay, you did all this and you spent a total of two minutes and 12 seconds in the race. I spent 10% of what you spent. I spent whole afternoon in. Having a great time foot wheel carding, having a ball with two stroke motors on road courses and ovals.

That was fantastic. The one thing I can tell you about different writing styles, if you enjoy fast-paced action, that’s the way I rate. There are a lot of authors that have to give you so much of a ton of exposition. They tell you the color of the blinds, the color, a tile on the floor, what color my shirt is.

That’s why I can’t read Tolkin. The first whole chapter is about the guy getting outta. Really? Yeah, to a degree I write as if I’m telling a joke. If I say a monkey walks into a bar, I don’t [00:25:00] waste time telling you what, what color the bar is, what color the chandelier is, or color of the beer bottles. I just go for it.

I’m also regarded as somebody who likes to introduce a lot of multiple threads into the book, and I wind up luckily being able to pull them all together and have a fitting conclusion. Let’s talk about more specifically, deadly Drivers. So I wanna read a kind of synopsis here to bring our audience up to speed on what the book is really.

Jetting off to Monte Carlo speeding through the tight turns of a mountain road in route to an evening at the casino. What could be more exhilarating after racing in a Grand Prix? Bryce Winters boards a luxury yacht to bask in the limelight and mingle with celebrities only to find a gun to his head.

From the rolling Hills of Vermont to some of the world’s most powerful cities, winters is thrust into improbable adventure, riveting intrigue, and elusive romance. The question remains, can he navigate around the dead ends in a maze of CIA manipulation and entrapment, or will he fall [00:26:00] prey to the sinister forces of underworld intelligence?

So I’ve personally read Deadly Driver. To me, it’s an arrive and drive jump in Strapp Down and go sort of read to your point, it’s very fast paced. You are thrown directly into the action on page one. I feel that the book is lots of fun. It’s a great introduction to the Motorsports world, as you said, especially Formula One, especially in today’s day and age of people watching, you know, Netflix’s Drive to Survive and being more interested in the motor shore discipline of Open Wheels, specifically formula.

Why Formula One? Are you a fan? I’m a big fan of Formula One. I think it’s the ultimate bit in motor sports and because I’m a travel buggy, because I’ve traveled the world and attended so many different events all around the world and enjoyed the cultures and the cities and the people and everything. If I was gonna write a book about racing, I wanted to have a global audience.

I wanted to go kill to them. Obviously if you wanna sell books, you wanna sell ’em all around the world. You still wanna write something about NASCAR or IndyCar. You wanna write something that someone in quite series will wanna [00:27:00] read. Somebody who goes to Suzuka or who goes to Hockenheim, Gerber Green Silverstone, I want them to pick it up and relate to it.

So let’s talk about Bryce a little bit. We kind mention him a couple times earlier. People might be thinking, how plausible is a Formula One driver and super spy combo? Does this imply something that has occurred in the past? Am I implicating something maybe we shouldn’t be talking about. The concept came to me and I just started writing.

It wasn’t slider. I finished the book that I ran into some folks in Los Angeles who claimed that there were a few drivers way back in the. Who might have been doing a few things overtly for the governments weather was for the United States government. British government, the German government for that matter.

I think it’s very plausible. Bryce operates in a world that’s super elite. There’s not that many F1 drivers on the planet. He gets to go to all these fancy galas, meet all these fancy people, go places where a lot of people can’t go. He hops anybody. He’s partying on yachts, private jets, et cetera.

Something happens in the book that puts him in a vulnerable [00:28:00] position. The CIA catches him. And they force him to work with him. It’s pretty simple. You’re gonna do this or we’re gonna make this known. You’re gonna be not in a world of trouble just with the United States. Be in trouble in these other countries.

And so they force him to work for him. He doesn’t mind doing some of the jobs that they assign him cuz he believes he’s doing the right thing for his country. He doesn’t like having a gun. Put it his head. That’s what he really struggle. So his dilemma is trying to win a a second Formula one championship.

He wants to do better than Mario, versus his goal was be as good as Mario and then rise to the occasion, go another step. So he wants to do that. He wants to do the job that the government’s asked him to do, but he also wants to break free of that. He’ll go to some extreme ends to try and break free, whether not he ever accomplishes that.

Reader’s gotta find out the. And to add the other little element to this, he suffered a tremendous heartbreak in his younger years in Vermont. He’s never found love again. He’s never pursued it. And so he finally runs into a woman on a long haul flight, is totally taken by her. [00:29:00] He decides to pursue her when she realizes what she’s gotten herself into.

I’m not gonna elaborate on that. No spoilers here. Chico Lewis, and his job is to try and win. And it gets very complicated. So I really like the fact that Bryce is a simple guy. His upbringing is very relatable to most of the people that are probably with, like you said, grew up in Vermont, backwoods running cars, having fun, started on the lower leagues and worked his way up.

It’s very similar to the stories of Andy Pilgrim and Andy Lee and other folks that we’ve interviewed on the show. Obviously, the bigger overture is that Mario Andretti is one of his heroes, or that he’s gonna. As good as if not better than Mario, right? A triple crown winner, all those kinds of things. So I wonder, is Mario Bryce’s Idol or is he more complex than that?

I feel that there’s a lot of you in him as well. So how much of that comes through, like the more in-depth part of Bryce’s personality? How was he formed? What did you model? Harmon probably evolves from the fact that I wanted to be in law enforcement. [00:30:00] He grew up in an environment raised by a cop, Adam.

With those two influences in his household, can imagine what that byproduct is. Just like you have young people that are growing up in the Midwest, they’re homegrown, they have a strong work ethic. They believe in America. They’re very patriotic. So that’s what you got when you meet Christ lawyers. As I wrote the book and put it out for reviews, there was a French journalist that came back to me and said, can’t really relate to him, cuz Rice, he’s not like formula drivers.

I said, well, he. He’s an American kid growing up in Rover, Vermont. He didn’t grow up in the streets of Monte Carlo. A thousand dollars watch on his wrist, going to exclusive schools, born into a family of fortune and fame. He’s worked for everything he’s gotten, and so it’s a different culture completely.

He’s not like the typical formula and driver, and I think that’s what makes him special. So he is got a car tucked away in Vermont. He lives in Utah, but when he does go back to Vermont, he picks up his black Subaru w r. but nowhere else in the rest of the book. Does it ever mention what he’s got tucked away in his garage [00:31:00] in Utah?

So what is in Bryce’s, let’s call it in, in car garage. Three or four car. We’re still working on this, but anyway, the Subaru wx, so you know, comes to the fact that I love Rally race and I know a lot of the guys in Vermont Sports car. And so in the story Rice befriends them and they have a working relationship with him.

He started out with Tim O’Neill, new h. That’s where some of the other history comes from. But when you do get to his home in Park City up in the hills after to go inside his garage, he’s got his Uncle Pete’s Toyota pickup, which is an old standby. He has a Mercedes, A MG G T coop that they’ve sent him because he’s involved with Mercedes and racing.

That’s a red one, by the way. It’s a beautiful vehicle. He also has a Chevy Tahoe Z 71 that he used to just cruise. He’s an American guy, so he’s got mostly American cars. The foreign stuff that’s there was was Central by Germany. By the Mercedes. He’s gotta have a bike in there too, right? Well, yeah. That’s not American.

No, it’s not a Harley. It’s a Ducati red [00:32:00] to match the Mercedes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well that, yeah, and that’s the funny thing too. If people were to take the time to study the cover of Deadly Driver, I had mentioned to you offline that there’s something about the cover that nobody’s picked up on that’ll come to play in a sequel.

Then I’m halfway through right now and I’m just gonna leave it at that. I just mentioned Ducati, and I’m gonna mention the book cover for Deadly Driver so you can study it and see what I planted there that nobody’s seen yet. That’s the funny part about Deadly Driver. It’s a book where there are a ton of twists and turn, which keeps the reader waiting for, pun intended, the next AP.

and I noticed as I was reading it, there’s a ton of nods to VP Fuels. Obviously it’s in your background. You were there for 30. Some are obvious and some not so much. Why don’t we stop and talk about the P R I scene, some of the nods you made specifically in that it felt like a homecoming and it almost felt like you were telling people, but not telling people.

Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you. And kind of name dropping and going on there. So what was that, all that? Why was that in kind of in the middle of the book? Oh god, that’s very complicated. [00:33:00] That’s very, very complic. After I retired from vp, the Seima show of the p r I show the Auto Sports Show in Birmingham.

Some of the other big shows around the country had always been something I had attended. Always worked with the VP uniform, et cetera. I wanted to send Bryce because he’s American once the season’s over, he’s not spending his time on the slopes in Switzerland, and he’s not in Belize. He’s back home in Park City here in Vermont, visiting his family.

So when he goes to the p r I show, it gives him an opportunity to say hello to the people that helped him along the. The friendships that he is made because as he worked his way up through mobile track racing at Stafford and Thompson and on the dirt track at Lebanon Valley, a lot of people were friends, mechanics, crew members, et cetera.

For me, that was a journey. The first PR I went back to everybody was, Hey, you retired. What doesn’t matter with you? What are you doing? You know, what are you gonna do? It was a way of having me go back through that. But in Bryce doing, He got to thank a lot of the folks who had meant something to him in his career, but it also gave him an opportunity in the [00:34:00] book to tease what he might be doing in the future.

In the book, there’s something critical that’s happened after the last race of the season. And so as he’s wandering around the P R I show before it opens, they let him in early to say hi to some folks. He stops by the NASCAR booth and he stops by the EMS and the local media. And some of the foreign I press that are following him around are like, what’s this?

what’s in me. And so he just says, you never know. Maybe I’ll go back to Ryan Cup, maybe I’ll back into him a car. Who knows? You’ll just have to wait and see what happens. But the last page of Deadly Driver will let you know what he’s up. No spoilers, . Yeah. But I do want to take yet another pit stop here and ask you a question because the p r I scene was also important in the fact that there were some other undertones.

and you make some hints about maybe your personal thoughts on EVs electric vehicles in that particular scene. So I wanna ask you, what are your thoughts on the evolution coming from the fuel industry? That’s probably something that needs to happen on a grand scale, but there’ll always be a [00:35:00] niche, always be just as there is today.

Motorsports is not mainstream. Not everybody on every street is involved with motorsports, so always be. They’ll always be racing. Gasoline will always be around in some capacity, as will lubricants, et cetera, et cetera. But EV is coming. They’ll be here to stay. And just like as we’ve toured this beautiful facility today, as you see the evolution of sprint cars and all the other cars they’ve got here, the EVs will go down the same road.

Just like everything else, remember the first cell phone I ever had came in a black box. There was a size of a lunch bill, and now you, they’ve got these little itty bitty tiny things that connect you with the world. I feel like I’ve got a Dick Tracy watch and you know, where I could talk to people, check the internet, order lunch, check the stock market, and book a flight.

So EV’s will probably get down that same route, but us guys. Love the smell of race, fuel, all the other things that come along with that, and the exhaustive nitro methane, they’ll remain for a long time, at least in our lifetimes. I would think. The only thing that concerns me the most about it all is I remember hanging out with the guys in high school where we were changing a [00:36:00] carburetor, playing with a time in life doing all the cool things they used to do in the garage.

Whether you’re done with your uncle or your brother, your father, best friends, whatever. There was a camaraderie that came about encircling the engine, so, What are you gonna do now? Am I supposed to sit on the curb with my grandson and show him how to change batteries? Flashlight. There’ll always be something about racing that will draw those of us who enjoy those competitive sports to it.

Of everything with EVs and racing that concerns me is the same. I was at Catalonia a couple years ago when somebody was testing, racing an elect motorcycle. What the, almost like, you know, when you go to the beach, you’ve got a mosquito or something, or buzz around your ear. It’s like, what is. If you go to an NRO national event and you stand at the starting line when John Force does a burnout and you feel your chest rattle, there’s a wow factor and electric’s just nu, unless they figure out a way of sending thunderbolts out to the people in the crowd to give sort of a static charge or something.

I don’t see the entertainment [00:37:00] value and I can see that, and a lot of people have said that. And you know, we say that even about different ice power plants. When you compare. As an example, you know, there’s nothing like the sound of a flat six or a Ferrari E 12, or even the difference between the C seven and the C eight s at INSA races, right?

I mean, the C seven and the Mercedes SLS is they’re ground thumpers. To your point, you not only do you hear them, you feel them. And so we have gotten that response a lot from folks to say, what I will miss the most from racing is the sound. For me, the analogy would be watching a very passionate hot love scene in a movie versus watching a silent movie.

Yeah, that’s the differe. A lot of folks have also said, and maybe this is how they justify it, there’s a high probability that motor sport will become very equestrian. How do you feel about that particular statement? The biggest frustration I’ve had in the last 20 years is seeing how racing has changed as far as attendance goes.

What was the 2008 one? We had the issues that caused everybody to stop spec. People [00:38:00] stopped going to races, people stopped doing a lot of different. What I’ve found was for the longest time people didn’t come back. Scary things seemed to be that they had gone away from races. They had found something else to do and they had come back to the racetrack.

Promoters and sir are struggling very hard to get some cases. You see that you go to the US Nationals, it’s a packed house. The special events are always gonna have packed houses. 8,500 was sold. It was 400,000 people. I forget what the attendances is there, but you also have to model in the fact that they haven’t had full capacity allowed because of Covid for the last few years.

So sadly, it seems though some people have found other things to do. Some people have gone to an N H R race, they’ve gone to see the nitro cars, but then they’ve seen it and they not come back. That’s a sad thing. That’s why promoters and series and racers have to evolve and they have to continue to reinvent themselves to give people.

More something to bring them back. These phones, if hears and everything else are great, but they [00:39:00] cause so many people who used to come out and see and feel an experience, excitement are now sitting behind a screen doing all these other things, playing all these other games. And if they’re doing something relating to motor sports, they’re driving on the screen.

And I can tell you from racing in, in Baja, of course, to almost going off a couple cliff sides and all the other fun things that that. Starting with carts, getting in somebody’s pint down, doing some burnouts in the driveway. All those things are experiential. Nothing on a screen can replace that. Yeah, sure.

You can go to Universal and your chair can vibrate when you’re seeing a scene with, with a Shrek thing, which I did with my grandchildren and stuff, but there’s nothing like strapping it and yourself, get in a race car, fire that thing up and go have some fun, and then it’s, you’re competitive doing it side by side, going on a.

With somebody that’s just as hungry, just as motivated as you are. Nothing like it. So will Bryce ever sit and strap into a formula EE car if his series continues? Is that a thought cross? He might be involved with ownership, but he won’t drive one. [00:40:00] Well, it’s the same thing we just said a few minutes ago.

I, I had the opportunity to go to the formula in Brooklyn and to be honest with you, if there was something, I shouldn’t say this, but there was something more interesting for me to do, uh, in Montreal doing something with the guys who run fan. Which is the F1 store in the old city of Montreal. I understand what formula is doing, but when I’ve seen it on television, all’s here is s squeak of the tires.

It just doesn’t excite me. I wanna support the sport and get people to go out and give it a try, but for me, myself, nah. Gotta make noise. So let’s go back to the book a little bit, talking about Bryce, his humble upbringings, and if you follow his career, you had him at Lebanon doing roundy rounds and things like that, and he works his way up.

Inces sports cars into formula. But there’s that Team O’Neill part that sticks out. Growing up, a WRC fan, myself, group Pier, I’ve always wanted to do that. When I look at how expensive it can be to get into rally in the United States, that gave me pause when I read book and I said, how did he afford, you know, how did that work out for him?

Well, in [00:41:00] Bryce’s case, book starts out at a young age when he is, he’s late teens. Essentially what he did was he fell in love with rally racing and he did a deal with Tim O’Neal. I’ll put the hours in. I’ll work here, sweep up. I’ll do whatever. Teach me some things. Learn what I can. Let me take one of these out.

You’re not talking about a WRC world-class car that Travis Piran might play with for Vermont Sports Car. There are some lower grade, lower level rally cars where you go out on the course and and run. Don’t need a lot of money to do that. It’s gotta sign up. You could go to the Tim O’Neill school and take her.

Guess what? You’re driving a rally car if you’re good at it. And as our guide today at the museum said, if you’ve got some balls, then strap in and go in something faster. Give it a try. And you know what’s funny about that part of the story? I relate that to pro driver, Andy Lee’s story where he did the same thing, never finished high school, found himself in Arizona, turned wrenches at Bonderant, and then worked his way up.

So him and Bryce are similar in that way against [00:42:00] Bryce. Is this really? Every guy in America raced car driver. But on the same token, there’s so many facets of other famous race car drivers stories in his kind of more complex persona. And that’s what I really enjoyed about this. Is pulling those threads out and going, that reminds me of this former guest from the show, or this driver that I know, and things like that.

And it makes it very relatable for us, at least our audience. And then the people beyond, to your point, is getting them out there to understand that there’s more depth to these drivers. They’re not just people strapping on helmets than going around in circles. Very true balancing act though had to do though that was a struggle for me was some racers have told me there wasn’t enough racing in the book, and some people have.

Uh, there might, for me, there might have been a little too much detail in some of the formula I racing. And so that was in the early drafts when I was getting people to my betas, as you call it, s beta readers give them a chapter. They give you the feedback type, you go in the right direction. If it’s interesting, if it’s not, but the balancing act that I worked with Deadly Driver and I’m working on in the sequel is giving people who [00:43:00] are into motor sports enough to get them excited, but also giving someone who doesn’t know that much about motor sports enough to be interested.

Not just in a thriller aspect, because Bryce’s story could take place anywhere. I could have said this character not in motor sports. I could have had a little CPA in an accounting firm. I mean, there’s all kinds of folks that get stuck doing things to the FBI because they have to do a plea deal or something.

It was a good balancing act. I think I pulled it off. You seem like you liked it so. Well, there’s one other part that I did appreciate and you being from this area, from the East Coast especially, especially Pennsylvania, for a lot of us we call Summit Point Home and seven Point Raceway is mentioned in the book, especially their defensive driver training and things like that.

That’s also, you know, grand toward Motorsports, home track. A lot of us, you know, pilgrimage there weekend after weekend for S E C A, NASA races and et cetera. So I wanted to thank you for throwing that in there. A lot of people forget about Summit Point, right? It used to be part of the TransAm series back in the day.

You know, it, it’s kind of fallen down in the rinks, but they’re [00:44:00] also seeing a resurgence now after 53 years of being open. So I, I really appreciated you doing that. That was my pleasure. I love Summit Point. I’ve been there many, many times myself. So that being said, the flow of the book, it really does grab you right away.

Like I said, the first three chapters are really set the stage and then you start to interleave the exposition, right? For like the next 12 chapters or so. and it’s done in this flashback sort of way. It reminded me of how some TV shows and movies do it. It’s like you’re thrown in the action. You’re going, what?

What is going on here? They’ve captivated you, they’ve drawn you in, and now let’s go and show you how we got there. And it plays this bouncing back and forth again for like the next 12 chapters or so. So that led me to my next question, which is, could you see Deadly Driver being turned into a screenplay

Oh. Yes. The beauty of that is most of the reviewers, a lot of the people that have read the book, have told me it reads like a movie. It ought to be a movie. It ought to be a limited series. It ought to be something. I agree. When I write books, [00:45:00] I see it as a movie. In my head, I see it playing out in my head.

My studied film, one of the side studies I did, Penn State, was film courses full circle all the way back to the funeral home. When I was in sixth grade, my father allowed my brother and I and a family friend, a schoolmate to make a video, make a movie, essentially at the funeral. We had casket, we had dry ice and buckets.

We had all the spooky stuff going on. So I’ve always been a movie buff and I’ve always been interested in these that rotate around that. Following everybody’s encouragement, I reached out to some folks in California. I met with some producers and directors who have given me notes on what I should do, what I shouldn’t do.

They’ve encouraged me to talk to this guy, all this guy. There are people that claim to have connections to Tom Cruise, and they’re trying to get the book in front of. Because if everybody on the planet that could do something special, a deadly driver, Cruz probably could. However, you’d have to read the book.

I don’t see Cruz as Bryce Winters. I see him as Max Lerner. I would agree with you in that. So Max, for [00:46:00] those that haven’t read the book yet, is the person who really takes Bryce to the next level. He’s the money behind the scenes, behind the team, the TM owner, all that kind of stuff. He’s, yeah, he’s a German guy.

I’d love to see Tom Cruise. Pull off the accent. You know, that’d be kind of funny. Well, remember though, he did letter boat, well, I forget the name of the book, but, oh, Valkyrie. Yeah, Valkyrie did. Valkyrie and he didn’t lay it on too hard. Werner is pure German, but he’s Americanized. Yeah. But he also has a dark side.

Comes out. And I think crews could really get his teeth into that. But there’s a million of other people that would, could do a fantastic job as well. I’d love to see the casting call that, like to see who they pick. I envisioned this Bradley Cooper type playing a Bryce, you know. Oh, the brown hair comb over boy next door sort of racer.

Right? Well, there’s all kinds of things. What I wrote, uncle Pete, I pictured, uh, Sam Elliot. Everybody knows Sam Elliot most recently from atd. That was, that was the vision I got from you too. Yeah. Sam Elliot kind of character. But here’s a stretch that isn’t really a. Chris Pratt and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Chris Pratt, married Schwarzenegger’s daughter, I believe. How about [00:47:00] Pratt as Bryce Winters And Schwarzenegger as Warner . He’s got the accent and that can work. Although I don’t know how serious I would take it at that point because I’m a big Schwarzenegger fan, but every movie I watch, I consider it him a comedy.

So you know. Yes. And then well, then you gotta go to who? Who do you cast as Kyo? She’s a Japanese lawyer. I mean, who do you put in that, that role? There’s a tremendous amount of exquisite actresses that could play that role. But you know what happens when I’ve learned. From visiting with these producers and people who have talked to me about the film, either as a film or a limited series or as a regular series, once they buy the project, they do whatever they wanna deal with it.

If all of a sudden Chito, they don’t want her to be from Japan anymore, they want her to be Hungarian or Australia. Yeah. Or, or whatever. Or Max, suddenly Bryce becomes English and he’s really Jason Sta thumb and it’s the transporter. No, that can’t happen. But Max. It doesn’t have to be Max Weer. It could be Max O’Malley.

Yeah, it could be. He could be from anywhere. There are certain parts of the world, south American for instance, [00:48:00] they are rabid Formula fans. So having Max be from Sao Pa works. Yeah. All kinds of things you can do. If you remember the book starts out at Sochi, but what’s happened since Sochi first, Sochi lost its race and then Putin decided to go Arab shit in.

And so here we are. So as I’ve developed the limited series scripts pilot and the limited series scripts, sort of have to pull that for that. We’ve moved it outta Russia. I have a lot of friends in Russia. I love the Russian people. They’re great folks. I’ve been there many times, but I don’t wanna give any attention to Yeah, and there’s, I can see you easily dropping the hung Ring in its place, you know.

No, we actually, there’s something with me and my French counter. So we’ve gone Magna, we’ve gone now we’ve gone to Paul Ricard. Oh, nice. Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes. Because actually, if you know what, where Paul Ricard is very, very close to Marsai and I don’t wanna get shot. If anybody’s listening from Marsai, there is a strong underworld in Marsai.

There is a French mafia, so to [00:49:00] speak, the same way there is in Russia, the same way there is in South. You know, they’re so, it’s an easy conversion. Yeah. It’s so, it’s very easy to do some of the tweaking that I needed to do, and it also helps too, because b. His third home is on the French Riviera. So you know, him being in France makes it a little easier too for movement, probably for filming, things like that.

So there’s a lot of upward possibility there. Yeah. He maintains a residence in Monte Carlo because you know, the tax laws there. I think the rule is you have to have a resident six months in a day in order to get the tax breaks. And there’s mention of that in the book too. He says, oh, I gotta be here proximate of time and all this kinda, that’s what he does.

So that actually leads into the next question, you know, without giving any spoilers or talking about the sequel or anything like, What is Bryce’s future? What do you think? What do you thinking? What can you share with us? We know certain things happen in the book. We know there’s a, there’s a happy ending, so to speak.

Despite his injuries, he’ll be able to come back and the following season, he’ll be trying some new things. I really don’t wanna lay too much out there. I, I [00:50:00] really believe that if people read Deadly Driver, they’ll care about Bryce. They’ll like him, they’ll wanna follow his career, and they’ll wanna find out what happens to him next.

If they hang in there and they enjoy the first book, the other one will. So outside of your own books, do you have any recommended reads for our audience? God, right now, everything Jack Har has written has been super hot. Jack is a former Navy Seal who worked for the government in a lot of other capacities after he left the seals.

He’s been reading since he was fourth and fifth grade. Believe the story is his mother was a librarian. This guy fell in love with books at an early age. He’s read thousands of books and he took everything he learned from those. Hannah’s written the series that was turned into a limited series on Amazon called The Terminal List.

So anything Carr’s done has been great. As I said earlier, fields of Fire just came out. That’s Ryan Stack, that’s just a view novel. He’s an editor that I work with on a couple of my books. Great guy. The scariest thing that gets me is I run into people every day that say, Anna Reid. I’ve read a book since high school and the only reason I read it in high school is cuz they [00:51:00] told me I had to.

I get it. If you. All day and all night you’ve got your other things going on in your world. You just don’t have the bandwidth or the time you’re exhausted and you can’t do it. I understand, but some people say, I don’t have time to sit there. I can’t sit there and read a book. I can’t paste through it.

Whenever there’s solutions, there’s audible books. Uh, audibles has opened up a whole new world to people who, truck drivers, somebody who works with their hands, somebody can put it on their speakers or put a headphones and just go for. And Deadly Drivers available as an audible book as well. Yes. And another top tip for folks that don’t have time to flip the old paper pages.

You can also leverage your local library and apps like Libby as well as hoopla and be able to digitally take books out from the library so there’s no cost. So if you’re looking at it going, oh man, some of these services are pretty pricey. I’m already oversubscribed my budget. So there are some freeways to get ahold of these books.

So there’s some awesome resources there. And there’s also. [00:52:00] Some people wanna read on an airplane, but they don’t want to deal with the paper in the book, et cetera. So you can read a Kindle. Something that everybody asked me before was, Hey, I’m 60 years old. My eyes are failing. How about large print? Guess what?

We got Deadly Driver in large print that’s available as well. So jk, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover so far? Your podcast? It’s great. Ever since I’m, I met you offline. I’ve listened to a bunch of the shows. The most recent one I think was with Andrew Pilgrim, which open up a whole new world for me cuz I didn’t know that much about him.

But it was a fascinating interview, very relaxed conversation. It wasn’t really an interview, it was a conversation that you had. So I enjoyed the way you. If you’re looking for thrillers oven deadly driver, I’d say Pick up Ryan ST’s, field of fire. Go to the races. If you’ve not been or you haven’t been in a while, you’re checking out for us.

It’s getting to be the fall and the east coast. The leaves are starting to change already. That’s probably because of the drought more than anything else. Racing’s gonna close the garage doors pretty soon, so pick it in the last races you’ve got. Enjoy. Author, JK Kelly lives in [00:53:00] media, Pennsylvania with his wife Lisa, and continues a never ending pursuit of the next adventure.

He has just finished another thriller, the Blood Compass. All six of his books are available on Amazon in either paperback, Kindle, or Audible Formats. And you can learn more about JK and his work by visiting www.jkkelly.com or following him on social at JK Kelly books on Instagram and Twitter. At author JK Kelly on Facebook and you can always look him up on LinkedIn as well.

So jk, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us. I actually really am looking forward to the history of EP and some of the other books you have coming out, and I’m really excited to know what happens with Bryce and if there’s some crossover with some of your other characters like Math, Christopher and others that are in your series.

So the best of luck on your subsequent novels and we look forward to reading them. Thank you. Really.

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