The second chapter of Pirates of Sausalito is narrated by Dawn Felton, the daughter of Fenton Felton, the greedy developer who wants to evict the houseboaters so he can build a luxury marina. We’ve just met him in Chapter 1, where he pressures Police Chief Tin Holland to clear out the houseboaters immediately or risk losing her job. “Sink their damn boats,” he says. “Whatever it takes.” (You can listen to Chapter 1 here.)
In Chapter 2, we also meet Honest Abernathy, who, as Dawn says, “is handsome and charming, dresses like a pirate, and has more than enough low life in him to infuriate her father.” She’s no hippie, but she’s rebelled by taking up with the long-haired and flamboyant Honest, the self-proclaimed leader of the houseboat resistance. It’s her birthday and he has promised her a birthday present that will “blow her mind.”
You can listen to the whole audiobook of Pirates of Sausalito for $10. Go to AMPlify Audiobooks and use the coupon code “pirates”.
Pirates is also on the shelf at Sausalito Books by the Bay and is available at the Sausalito and Tiburon libraries. It’s also available on Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, and wherever you get your audiobooks, including Libby, the library audiobook app, where it’s free with your library card in Marin and San Francisco counties. (If your library doesn’t have it, you can request it.)
Here’s the first review I received for the audiobook.
On Wednesday, May 20, 7 pm, I’ll be giving my “Sausalito Houseboat Wars: What Really Happened” talk for Marin History Museum. It will be at the First Presbyterian Church, Fifth & E Streets, San Rafael. Tickets are $20. Get them here.
In the late 1970s, the “houseboat wars” erupted in Sausalito on the site of Marinship, the abandoned World War II shipyard. Hippies and squatters were living free and easy on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown, but public officials and developers set out to evict them and build new docks to attract more affluent residents. The counterculture was in full flower, and the houseboaters resisted eviction with street theater, civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, and more. All in front of TV cameras.
Join me for a colorful retelling of those turbulent times, including excerpts from houseboat residents and journalists, photographs by Bruce Forrester and Pirkle Jones, and video clips of TV news reports from the waterfront. I’ll also read an excerpt or two from Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, which is fiction, but based on and inspired by those true events. As Larry Clinton, former president of the Sausalito Historical Society, said, “If it didn’t happen exactly this way, it could have.”
When I launched my book in May 2024, I reached out to a librarian at the Mill Valley Library about hosting a talk, and she connected me to the Mill Valley Historical Society. They wanted me to talk more about the history my book is based on than the book itself. I was wary — I never promised historical accuracy in my book, and now I had to distinguish what really happened from what I imagined.
But the librarians knew what they were doing. Enough people registered for the May 1 event, we had to move from the basement meeting room to the main reading room — and it’s unlikely that many people would have come if I were talking only about my book. To prep for the talk, I plunged back into the research, and fortunately, the real history is as full of drama and colorful characters as my novel. The talk went wonderfully and I’ve delivered this talk about ten times now.
P.S. You can learn more about the novel here and the history here. There’s a video on the history page of my Mill Valley Library presentation, which I encourage you to watch — but not if you’re coming to my talk, which will be a rerun of the library talk. Below is the video, which is 50 minutes long. I’ve posted highlights below.
When I turned my play (“Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery”) into a novel (Pirates of Sausalito), the toughest challenge was how much to get into the characters’ heads. You don’t have to write that in a play, though it’s useful to think about.
I chose to let ten characters narrate their parts and some had inner lives very different from their public lives. Mickey Macgillicuddy, for example, lives in a tiny houseboat in Aquarius Houseboat Harbor, which developers want to turn into a luxury harbor. Mickey is a flaky burnout, but he’s also funny. He loves an audience. The first time we see Mickey is in Chapter 4, which is told from the point of view of Honest Abernathy, one of the leaders of the houseboaters’ resistance. Mickey is preening for the young woman lawyer who is helping out with legal strategy.
“Yeah,” Mickey says, “like, I went to college. Like Grateful Dead University. That’s where I got my higher education, a PhD in LSD. Hey, like, how do you know deadheads have been staying at your pad?” He pauses. “They’re like, still there.”
But Mickey is not the flaky hippie he appears to be. I can’t tell you more that that because I want you to listen to this chapter, from my audiobook. This is Micky narrating Chapter 5, “Eviction Raid.” It starts as he watches the police boats on their way into the harbor to evict the houseboaters.
[AUDIOBOOK] Pirates of Sausalito, Chapter 5. Eviction Raid (Mickey MacGillicuddy)
I would love to hear what you think. There are four chapters before this, so you’re jumping on a moving train, but this is the first time we see things through Mickey’s eyes.
Later in the book, Police Chief Tin Alley asks Mickey if it’s true he lives in a small houseboat. “It’s so small,” he says, “if I order a large pizza, I have to eat it outside.”
I have long wanted to create a “brand” for my four books to unify them. Make them look like they belong together. My books are not a series, but they share enough similarities that they do indeed belong together. But the covers do not demonstrate that.
Here are the front covers as they exist now — in the order published.
They do not look like they belong together, though the first and the fourth are close, and my intention was to redesign the other two to match.
When I Killed My Father was easy, though I have not uploaded the new cover to the two sites where I publish my books — Amazon/KDP and IngramSpark. (One of the benefits of self-publishing is that authors can upload new covers and corrected manuscripts at any time for no cost. It can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.)
Wasted has not been easy. Over the last number of years, I designed more than ten different versions of the cover and was not happy with any of them. Now I’ve got three that I think are better. I welcome your feedback.
When I designed the Wasted cover in 2015, I was pleased with it. I’d been a graphic designer for decades, but I did not realize until later that there are “rules” about book covers that I did know, one of the most important of which is that the cover telegraphs to the reader its genre. Here’s what designer Joel Friedlander, former president of Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), said about the Wasted cover:
Obviously the designer is skillful, but the big fail is that the book looks like nonfiction or a corporate publication, and has no trace of what must be the excitement and drama in the story.
Guilty as charged
I’ve been messing with all sorts of cover ideas for a while, and when I sought feedback on them a two years ago, more people liked the one I considered ugly than any of the others. But I didn’t like it.
This is the ugly one.
I recently created another version of the cover that I like better. Then I took the existing cover, the one that looks like a nonfiction primer on recycling and adapted it to fit the brand. Rules are made to be broken, right?
Below are these two new versions. What do you think?
So here are new front covers that all share the same branding.
And then I had another idea, to make the branding more explicit by including the tagline: “Page-turner with a Conscience.” I have used that line many times in marketing the book, during book talks, in this author letter, on my website, and on sites where I sell my book. So I took another pass at each of my novels and added that to the top.
What do you think? I value your feedback. I’m too close to my books to be as objective as I need to be. Please share your feedback in the comment area below or contact me via email at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
One way or the other, I am committed to branding my books.
Now that I look at them at the small size most people will see them, the “page-turner with a conscience” is barely visible, so I probably need to scrap that idea or make it bigger.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
P.S. You may wonder whether devoting all this time to redesigning my book covers might not have been better spent writing my current novel. The answer is surely yes, but designing taps into a different part of the brain than writing and it’s “fun.” That’s my excuse anyway.
I would love to hear from you, even if you don’t have an opinion on the covers.
For most of the past year, I’ve been hawking my fourth and most recent novel, Pirates of Sausalito.
But this month, I’m pitching my first novel, Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.Set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico, Bones is one part political thriller, one part family soap, and one part murder mystery.
If you’re interested in politics and presidential campaigns, but feel overwhelmed by the news of the day, you might enjoy a fictional escape. Bones is full of dirty tricks, sleazy voter suppression, and the like, but it feels downright innocent from today’s vantage point.
(Speaking of innocent, I admit that in 2008 I believed that if the voter suppression tactics were exposed as what they were — attempts to limit voting by people who were more likely to vote for Democrats — that they would be discredited. How naive I was.)
Freedom! Now I have choice back for how I spend my free time, after 5 days of being enmeshed in this compelling story. Congratulations to my friend, J.B. Barry on this wonderful novel! I was actually a bit surprised, since it’s been a while since I wanted to read fiction, and even longer since I picked up a political thriller. And then, drawn in from the very beginning, I found myself “addicted,” reading after breakfast, on my commute, again after lunch and more before I turned the lights off to sleep over the last few days. —Roy Schachter
I was going to cut this one because it’s long, but once I reread it, I thought, no, I want you to read the whole review. 🙂
This is one of those unusual novels where you end up talking about the characters as if you knew them well—which itself makes for a wonderful read.
The setting is the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico, complicated by the romance, rage, and lives of two fabulously dysfunctional families.
From one family is the charming young Hispanic mayor of Albuquerque, Tomas Zamara, chair of the New Mexico Republicans for John McCain. From the other comes the astute, attractive, a tad plump but sexy Sierra Léon, an activist in a liberal nonprofit, who has been tabbed by her organization to run its campaign for Barack Obama in her native New Mexico.
Drawing on his own role in political campaigns, Barry deftly evokes a realistic sense of the heady thrills of a campaign, one that is sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks.
Sierra’s group bites back, once with a hilarious mock demonstration by “Billionaire Lobbyists for McCain,” complete with signs for NAARP, the National Association for the Advancement of Rich People, and other sarcastic taunts.
As the subtitle says, “Politics Is Tough. Family Is Tougher.” Zamara gets tangled in an affair with an attractive and brilliantly horny woman, Tory Singer, while he’s trying to rearrange some skeletons locked in the family closet. His autocratic father and his now-dead wife (it’s her bones in the wash) had cut shady deals with drug dealers and money launderers, which demands some deft maneuvers from Tomas.
As for Sierra, she has to cope with her depressive mother, her narcissistic dad, her cad of a boyfriend, and a reporter who’s desperate to get into her panties.
Zamara turns out to be the most interesting character, though some will not find him believable, because he’s a Republican who actually has integrity! —Bob Schildgen
★★★★★Five Stars I didn’t want to have to put the book down when I had to. —CACW
The second chapter of Pirates of Sausalito is narrated by Dawn Felton, the daughter of Fenton Felton, the greedy developer who wants to evict the houseboaters so he can build a luxury marina. We’ve just met him in Chapter 1, where he pressures Police Chief Tin Holland to clear out the houseboaters immediately or risk losing her job. “Sink their damn boats,” he says. “Whatever it takes.” (You can listen to Chapter 1 here.)
I chose to let ten characters narrate their parts and some had inner lives very different from their public lives. Mickey Macgillicuddy, for example, lives in a tiny houseboat in Aquarius Houseboat Harbor, which developers want to turn into a luxury harbor. Mickey is a flaky burnout, but he’s also funny. He loves an audience. The first time we see Mickey is in Chapter 4, which is told from the point of view of Honest Abernathy, one of the leaders of the houseboaters’ resistance. Mickey is preening for the young woman lawyer who is helping out with legal strategy. 
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