TIM CATHERSAL Tacoma author Brent Hartinger's second book is "The Last Chance Texaco."

JEN GRAVES; The News Tribune

The kid ran into his former group-home counselor on the street. He harassed the counselor's friends and denied ever knowing the counselor.

"What a jerk," said Brent Hartinger's friends as they all walked away.

Yeah, but you haven't read his file, Hartinger thought. The kid had been abandoned by his parents, booted from foster care and was now obviously living on the street.

Being a writer and not a social activist, Hartinger decided to tell the funny, exasperating, action-packed and sometimes heartwrenching tale of life in a group home. It's the subject of the Tacoma author's new book from HarperTempest, HarperCollins' young-adult imprint, "The Last Chance Texaco."

"The door was locked, and I sure as hell didn't have the key" is a jumpstart of an opening line, and with it Hartinger's laconic narrator, Lucy Pitt, announces her arrival at Kindle Home, dubbed "The Last Chance Texaco" because kids who fail there are sent to a maximum-security facility. The same was true for Bacon Home in Bellingham, where Hartinger was a counselor for four months in 1988.

"I wanted to show that not everybody starts from the same starting point," Hartinger said in a recent interview at his Tacoma home, which he shares with partner Michael Jensen, whose second novel, "Firelands," will be released in September. "There are reasons people are why they are."

But angst-ridden "message" books don't interest Hartinger. The 39-year-old author acquired a pragmatic attitude during 15 years of unsuccessfully trying to sell his books, plays and screenplays from 1986 to 2001. Now he has had national success with his first book about gay teenagers, "Geography Club," which is in its third printing. He has adapted it for a Seattle stage production that could lead to movie interest.

In the coming years, HarperTempest will release two sequels to "Geography Club" as well as a book called "Grand & Humble," about how the lives of a popular kid and a loser mysteriously intersect at the corner of Grand and Humble streets. Hartinger also is pitching a finished adult fantasy novel and working on chapter books for ages 8 to 12, possibly for HarperCollins and another publisher.

The second-best thing to being able to write for a living instead of doing odd jobs and freelancing is the reader e-mails awaiting Hartinger each morning.

"Every day, I wake up and there's somebody telling me I'm great," he said. Critics have been fairly kind, but "it's really the reader response that makes me giddy all day."

Hartinger suspects readers are pleased because he doesn't waste their time with a lot of expository and descriptive language. He's into plot. Using a detailed preliminary outline, he structures the books according to what he learned from playwriting: three acts, conflict in every scene.

"I don't understand the quiet novel, where nothing happens," he said. "I want a book that moves. If liking (Dan Brown's bestselling) 'The Da Vinci Code' makes me a rube, then put me in the rube category."

At first, Hartinger was uncomfortable with the implications of being a "young-adult" writer, but he has settled into it. Teen fiction has to be highly disciplined to be successful - "you have a generally reluctant audience, and you're competing against Madonna humping a couch, Janet's bare breast and Nintendo," he said.

Though the adult audience he found for "Geography Club" was a coup, Hartinger is happy to write to teens. His teenage years in Fircrest, where he was convinced he was the only gay kid around, left an indelible impression. Even today, as an established author with the respect and backing of a major publishing house, he relates to teenagers.

All teens, like the underdogs of Kindle Home, "deal with a lot of prejudice," Hartinger said. "They are a minority like any other, that people misunderstand."

Jen Graves: 253-597-8568
jen.graves@mail.tribnet.com

SIDEBAR: If you go

Brent Hartinger will read and sign "The Last Chance Texaco" at 7 p.m. Feb. 18, Tacoma Public Library, 1102 Tacoma Ave. S., 253-591-5666; 7 p.m. March 18, King's Books, 218 St. Helens Ave., 253-272-8801; 2 p.m. March 20, Barnes & Noble, 1530 Black Lake Blvd. S.W., Olympia, 360-534-0388.

THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO

By Brent Hartinger

HarperTempest, $15.99