Even smiling, the 58-year-old former Town Council member looks slightly pained. Fun, he acknowledges, "is not my strong suit."

So it's with some surprise that Protzman hits the bookstores this week to plug his first novel, "Jesus Swept," a seriously funny satire on love, religion and the pursuit of the meaning of life.

Written in tight, dialogue-driven chapters of two and three pages, the story reads like a plot out of an early Coen brothers movie (think "Raising Arizona").

In fact, Protzman was thinking screenplay as he spent nearly 10 years developing the bumper-sticker storyline that came to him one Sunday morning during a Unitarian church service.

The plot spins on a silver bracelet found in the sands of Myrtle Beach by Jesus with a metal detector. Jesus' real name is Gary, but the mysteriously inscribed bracelet briefly annoints him to followers Mark and Luke.

The bracelet passes through several hands in "Jesus Swept's" 276 pages: from Jesus to fiftysomething Liz Forsythe, the director of planned giving at Duke University, to redneck twins Hook and Sinker, the former nicknamed for the five-inch-long shark hook she ripped through her brother's bicep when he "tried his hand on her."

The inscription is translated by Liz's tiny, lesbian professor friend Gloria Grace in the Village of Weaver Woods. It turns out to be Aramaic and at least 1,000 years old. It's not giving anything away to say the inscription reads "Good works do. Kind and loving be. Joy in pleasure seek. ... These are the threads of life full filled."

And that, Protzman says over a folded slice of pepperoni pizza, is all he needed to get started.

"I was in church. I was bored out of my mind," he recalled.

A writer by trade, Protzman always carries something with him to jot down ideas that often come to him in bumper-sticker bursts.

He remembers only that the sermon that day was about going out and doing good. Three short phrases came to him: "Do good. Be nice. Have fun."

He realized if he could actually live his life by those six words -- in the Venn diagram where those concepts interlock -- he might be on to something.

Since then Protzman, who's made a living in marketing and today writes for corporate clients he won't name, says he has tried to live by the three commandments.

"It's been a real hard slog to get there," he said. "The first thing I tackled was 'be nice.' I mean I've been [a jerk] all my life."

The self-assessment sounds harsh. But in politics, Protzman was not known to suffer the pace of collective decision making in silence. He served one term.

The book became an obsession.

He worked 16 or 17 hours a day, toggling between his paid gig, his fiction and blog, BlueNC, an online stream of progressive consciousness that's had as many as 6,000 unique visitors a week. A longtime Democrat, Protzman switched to unaffiliated last year after the Perdue-Moore governor's race ("a blight on our culture").

Born again at 10 and raised Southern Baptist, he has written a book -- with gay drifters, pagan radio shows and randy goings on -- he knows many church-goers won't read. Even wife Jane Brown, the journalism professor who's studied music videos and teenage sexuality, was surprised by the novel's steamy scenes (numerous, but never graphic).

"Jane said, 'I didn't realize you thought about sex so much.' I said, "I don't -- it's the characters in the book.'"

In fact Protzman so fully inhabited his characters (even blogging as one character to learn her voice) that he didn't know what was going to happen to them next. When one dies late in the novel, he found himself weeping in anguish.

"Really, honestly, I had no idea. It was devastating," he said. "I'm almost crying right now."

As a novelist, "you are god," he explains. "I had made this world, and my favorite being in the world had just been obliterated in a car accident."

There's a joke in there about having a god complex, but Protzman seems humbled by his new role. Appreciative at least. This interview, he says, has been a real treat, his first time out for lunch in six months. He calls himself a hermit and looks it, unshaven and pale from the blue screen of the computer monitor.

They say if you sell 5,000 copies of a first novel, you've done well. In a bit of old bullishness, he's shooting for a million.

But he says he's now promoting a way to live as much as a novel, the profits of which he's donating to the Unitarian Church. "I think there's a chance for people to be taken by this book -- to do good, be nice, have fun."

He'll be back in church this weekend, guest preaching to the Unitarians in Hillsborough.

And if the sermon gets a little R-rated for Sunday morning?

Protzman smiles, just barely.

"If there's a denomination that can handle it, it's them."

mark.schultz@nando.com or 932-2003

IF YOU GO

James Protzman has several appearances:

•7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, at Market Street Books, 610 Market St., Southern Village, Chapel Hill. 933-5111

•10:30 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 25, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Hillsborough, 1710 Old N.C., Hillsborough. 644-0567

•7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Internationalist Books & Community Center, 405 W. Franklin St., Chapel Hill. 942-1740