Pirates of Sausalito
My fourth novel, Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, is now available.
The story, inspired by true events, is set in the late 1970s on the shoreline of Richardson Bay. Hippies and squatters living on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown are threatened by city leaders and developers who want to clear out the houseboaters and build a luxury dock.
The counterculture is in full flower and the houseboaters resist eviction with street theater, civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, and more — for example, an armada of dinghies pushing away police boats with oars. All in front of TV cameras.
Then someone gets stabbed.
Imagine Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Murder, She Wrote. One part hippies grooving on the waterfront, one part murder mystery. It’s a funny, fascinating, and entertaining story, and I think you’ll enjoy it.
Please buy it, read it, review it, and recommend it to everyone you see.
I’m not going to ask you again. (Well, not until a few paragraphs from now.)
Turning a play into a novel
Last year I wrote and directed ”Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery” at our local community theater and this novel is an adaptation and expansion of the play. I never set out to write a novel, but I finished the play script a few months into the pandemic when we had no idea when live theater might return. I started working on the novel then, and went into high gear once we wrapped up the play last March.
(Below is a photo from the play, showing the houseboaters pushing away the police boat with their oars. This really happened during the houseboat wars, though in real life, the boats were not made of cardboard.)
This is the first time I’ve adapted a play into a novel, and it was harder than I anticipated, even though two-thirds of the dialogue from the play ended up in the novel. So did all the main characters, though I changed some significantly. One of the hippie characters, for example, turns out to be an undercover spy/provocateur. That was not in the play.
The biggest difference is that the play is all dialogue and action and the novel includes the inner life of the characters as well. In the play, the actors bring the characters to life, and, of course, we perform the play in front of an audience and people laugh and laughing is contagious.
The play was funny and I wanted my novel to be funny too. But that’s a tricky proposition, especially because the play was a ridiculous cartoonish farce
The novel is still funny, or so I think, but it’s less ridiculous, less farcical, and less funny than the play.
Here’s what one beta reader so accurately stated: “Setting the play up as a farce works well because the action is fast, and the audience can sit back and take it all in. It’s Saturday night and we’re all ready for a laugh. Once the tone has been set, the viewer is happy to watch comically farcical characters played by actors free to go over the top. But reading a novel requires a different sort of audience commitment, because it takes longer, and the reader has to imagine sights, sounds, and in this case smells.”
A beta reader, for those who don’t know, is like a regular reader, except they read a pre-publication version of the book, and I ask them for honest feedback. The good news is that my beta readers were honest. That’s also the bad news. Some of the feedback was tough to hear.
The most important feedback I received, from many beta readers, was that some characters were too cartoonish and melodramatic. I took the feedback to heart, rewrote at least half the chapters, and I believe the final version is at least 10 percent better than the beta version, maybe more.
Did I say I was only going to ask you once to buy the book? Well, I lied. That’s what we fiction writers do.
You can buy the ebook here for $4.99 and the paperback here and here for $17. Soon, it will also be available at Sausalito Books by the Bay and Waterfront Wonders, also in Sausalito.
You can read a sample of the book here.
I would love to hear what you think. Contact me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com
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