Nowadays, you almost have to be a celebrity in order to be a successful author. But I’d rather fly under the radar. It’s rather uncomfortable, having a website in your own damn name and writing about yourself, but it’s about the laziest way I know to get and tell good stories. Mainly this site is here because I’d like to spread them around. There are good people to write about, out there. More than ever, we need good examples. So here we are.

I want this site to be positive, real, and classy. Uplifting, at every hairpin and sweeping high-speed turn.

The site includes links to a number of projects. There’s the book At All Costs, published by Random House, which I hope will be discovered for the unique story that it is, if not widely recognized for the ungodly amount of research that went into it. Bookstores think it’s a World War II history book, but it’s actually a character-driven, page-turning, dive-bombing, shoot-‘em-up sea adventure story. It tells how two American merchant mariners kept Hitler from getting the oil in Iraq and Iran, and winning the war. Last time I checked, 21 of 25 reader reviews on Amazon gave it five stars.

This version of the site also marks the debut of NewCarSnark. I’m not sure what it’s going to be. Maybe a reinvention of the car review. Or a reduction, to snarky bits and pieces. Maybe I’ll twitterize it. I’ve been a moto journalist for more than three decades, years, and now drive about 50 new cars a year, sometimes in beautiful places: Puget Sound, British Columbia and Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, just last week. Drove a new little Nissan Juke around the sweet city of Vancouver, and an $80,000 Range Rover over 13,000-foot Black Bear Pass above Telluride, Colorado—can’t get more King of the Hill than that. Also drove an all-new 2011 Jaguar XJL in the Columbia River Gorge where I live. Read it all here, and other stuff, on NewCarSnark.

Then there’s the Bandit Blog, the ongoing rollicking tale of my big honkin’ ’82 Oldsmobile stock car that the legendary Dale Earnhardt once drove, and that starred in my book Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots, one of the five best books about racing ever written, according to the great Brock Yates in the Wall Street Journal book review. Out-of-print hardcover copies bring as much as $300 on book collector sites, but 20 years after its publication it was reprinted in paperback by the prestigious University of Nebraska Press.

It’s dangerous to post a work in progress, like making a promise you might not be able to keep. But the next book will happen, probably sooner rather than later. I’ve got a million-word journal I’ve been keeping for 13 years, call it about parenting. It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This: The True Life Adventures of Papa Madre and the AngloArabAsian Brothers will be released. Don’t worry, it won’t be a million words. Maybe I’ll finish it while I’m kiteboarding in Baja next winter. Maybe I’ll post excerpts along the way. It’s a parenting memoir, of my life as a single dad with two boys, the ever-entertaining Tai and Maks. It will be like a sequel to Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots, every bit as wild as crashing stock cars into the wall at Charlotte and blowing up 600-horsepower engines at Daytona.

Meanwhile, I might do an e-book with River Without a Cause, my descent down Brazil’s dark River of Doubt, a class V whitewater tributary that runs through the Amazon jungle for nearly 500 miles through hostile Indian territory. Pictures here, maybe, by daring professional photographer Mark Greenberg, the shooter for this furiously bickering environmental expedition down the river that Theodore Roosevelt first descended in 1912 in dugout canoes with the famous Brazilian explorer, Colonel Rondon. The descent was only repeated once, in the 1930’s, before my expedition did it.

Or I might turn the story into a novel. Maybe a tale of redemption. The ghost of Teddy Roosevelt visits mahogany-smuggling, diamond-dredging, angry Amazon Indians shooting poisoned arrows from six-foot mahogany bows. Sometimes they have shotguns. It’s not that far off, from what’s happening down there. Maybe I’ll write up the story and post it.

So, welcome to my website. Every day a work in progress. You’ll learn stuff about new cars at the least, because that will be more or less regular. Photo essays for the rest, if it goes as planned. Pretty pictures is the rule.