Sportswriter now covering the playground

Mornings are for fiction; afternoons are for fact.

That's the way Mike Lupica divvies up his writing life these days.

Before lunch, Lupica the author works on his latest novel. After lunch, Lupica the journalist works on his latest sports column for the New York Daily News.

The same Lupica who has spent his adult life writing newspaper columns and books about grown-ups playing kids' games now also writes fiction about kids playing kids' games.

"My wife tells me that writing as a 12-year-old boy is perfect casting," the 55-year-old Lupica cracks in a recent phone conversation from his home in New Canaan, Conn.

He began writing young-adult books three years ago and now is aiming at an even younger audience with a new series,

Mike Lupica's Comeback Kids

, for middle-grade readers.

He'll be at the Chester County Book & Music Company on Tuesday night to talk about

Hot Hand

and

Two-Minute Drill

, the first titles in

Comeback Kids

.

The apparently tireless Lupica (four or five Daily News columns a week, more than 20 books, and a regular TV gig on ESPN's

The Sports Reporters

) writes for his young audience with rookie enthusiasm.

"It's something I enjoy doing," he says. "I love to get in my study and start scribbling and get these kids talking."

And he's scored with readers and critics.

His first young-adult book,

Travel Team,

spent three weeks at the top of the New York Times children's best-seller list in 2004.

Lupica's Y.A. novel,

Heat

, which also made the best-seller list when it was published last year, drew a rave review in the Times from Charlie Rubin, who teaches writing at New York University:

"There are plenty of men and aging boys who would rather go to a Yankees game with Lupica . . . than go fishing with the great DiMaggio: The success of [

Travel Team

and

Heat

] suggests that he may yet achieve that elevated status with young fans as well."

Lupica already had branched out successfully into writing books - including a few novels, before he decided to write for kids.

The idea of writing for younger readers came to Lupica in 2003 after one of his sons, Alex, then 12, was cut from his middle-school basketball team.

"I took all the kids who got cut, and started a team of my own," he recalls. "It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. We got our brains beat out for a while, but in the second half of the year, we started beating kids that had been beating us."

While Lupica the dad was coaching, Lupica the writer was contemplating.

The end of his contemplation was a fictional character named Danny Walker, who became the protagonist of

Travel Team

. Danny gets cut from his seventh-grade team because he's too small, but his troubles don't stop there. Lupica, who writes about kids overcoming odds that sometimes go beyond sports, gives Danny divorced parents and a dad who is an ex-NBA star with a drinking problem.

"This is not Brigadoon," Lupica says.

The stories in the

Comeback Kids

series "are the same kind of stories, but the books are a little shorter," Lupica says.

In

Hot Hand

, 10-year-old Billy Raynor, a talented basketball player with a shoot-first tendency, simultaneously tries to cope with his parents' separation and constant criticism from his dad, who is also his coach.

In

Two-Minute Drill

, sixth grader Scott Parry, a brain in the classroom and a bust on the football field, struggles to stay on the team even though the coach ignores him and the coach's son bullies him.

Lupica drives his story with dialogue and keeps description to a minimum. This requires a fine ear for the constantly changing patois of the American child, something that Lupica has developed as the father of four kids ranging in age from a 20-year-old sophomore at Boston College (Lupica's alma mater) to an 8-year-old daughter in third grade.

The language of his characters is "just what I've been listening to for 20 years coming from the back seat of my car and at my dinner table," Lupica says.

"My kids are also like my editors," he says. "If I get something wrong, they'll tell me."

Lupica wants his young audience to share "the kind of magic" he remembers from his own childhood when he opened the latest book in Clair Bee's great Chip Hilton sports series.

Writing about sports is a marvelous way to touch the young reader, says Lupica. "Everybody's got a permanent memory chip about sports."