SANTA CRUZ >> We’ve all heard of fish out of water stories. “Eros Found,” the newest installment in Jim Lucas’ Nick Bridger Stories book series, takes its own spin on this concept by bringing its main “fish” as far away from water as possible.

“Eros Found” sees protagonist Bridger leaving his surf mecca of Santa Cruz for a teaching position in the landlocked state of Vermont and trying to adjust to his new East Coast life.

As Lucas was finishing up the previous book, “Mountains to the East,” he explored the possibility of taking Bridger out of his natural environment near the Pacific Ocean.

“I wanted to put him in a position that was counter to everything that he was striving for,” he said. “I was searching for a place to put him, and Vermont popped up because it’s landlocked and it’s frigid in the winter.”

Having grown up near Santa Cruz, Lucas has been well-acquainted with the surfing culture since the ’60s when his older brother, Cy, took him surfing at Pleasure Point. He became more actively involved as a member of the Soul Patrol surfing group, fought against the raw sewage line at Sewer Peak, directed the Surfrider Foundation and has been inducted into the National Surfing/Wrestling “Ironman” Hall of Fame.

Lucas eventually got into the world of advertising and then teaching, where he taught creative writing at Pajaro Valley High School. It was there that he decided to flesh out a short story he had written for Surfer magazine decades earlier, into what became the first two installments of the Bridger series, “Waves are Calling” and “Mountains to the East.”

Both set the stage for Bridger as a Silicon Valley-born teen who attends a preparatory school on the East Coast, gets bullied, finds solace in surfing near his friend’s beach house in Pleasure Point and attends the fictional Coast College amid the Vietnam War.

In the third — but not final — book, “Eros Found,” Bridger is accepted to St. Albans University in Vermont where he works on his doctorate in teaching, all while yearning for the waves and his girlfriend, Veronica, back in Santa Cruz.

Lucas draws from his past experiences, even if some of the names have changed. While there is a city in Vermont called St. Albans, it does not have a university. Lucas said he wanted to set the story at a private school that was still renowned worldwide and drew on his experiences at a creative writing class he took at Princeton University as well as UC Santa Cruz and the former Bethany University in Scotts Valley.

“It was an amalgamation of all of those and lot of imagination,” he said.

The “East Coast versus West Coast” mentality is another element Lucas drew upon from personal experience. He worked for various advertising agencies in San Francisco, which meant flying out to New York quite often.“A lot of the ridicule that I experienced from the East Coast ad people versus me being this upstart California guy, a lot of that was incorporated into the East versus West (in this book),” he said.

“Eros Found” took two and a half years to write and was more time-consuming for Lucas than the previous two books because of the amount of research that went into it. A lot of that was centered around reading up on what it takes to get a Ph.D. as well as background information on the Beat Generation writers, since Bridger does his dissertation on Jack Kerouac.

“I had to make sure that everything was accurate from that standpoint because the worst thing you can do as a writer is say something, and then someone who’s reading says, ‘No, he wasn’t there’ or ‘He didn’t do that,’” he said. “Because of wanting accuracy, this one took considerably more effort.”

“Eros Found” also provided Lucas an opportunity to make antagonist Nathan Spade more three-dimensional, a bit of character development suggested by Lucas’ wife, Patty.

“She said, ‘It’s too predictable. He’s got to have some goodness out of this because even bad people have good things,’” he said. “In the end, there’s a bit of revelation on that.”

Lucas liked that “Eros Found” allowed him to utilize his imagination rather than strictly drawing from personal experiences as he did with the first two books. He is already starting on the fourth book which centers around wrestler Don Shadow losing his bid for the Olympics but being recruited by the State Department to become a spy.

“I’m writing my first spy novel,” he said.

Lucas likened it to the ’60s espionage series “I Spy,” only centered around wrestling instead of tennis.

A recurring theme throughout all the books is a desire to do what makes one happy rather than what looks good on paper. Lucas said that carries over into “Eros Found” where the end goal may not be what Bridger wanted but gets him closer to it.

“It may not be in the actual job that you thought of or the company or the university that you ultimately wanted, but you’re pretty darn close and you’re able to do the job as you’d like to do it versus being dictated to,” he said.

“Eros Found” is available on Amazon and locally at Two Birds Books, 881 41st Ave., Santa Cruz.