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.
I’m publishing my fourth novel this spring and I’m still vacillating about its title. Maybe you can help.
In January, I published an advance reader copy for beta readers with the title The Pretend Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story. Based on their feedback, I’m leaning now toward taking out “Pretend” in the title and “True Story” in the subtitle. That makes the title The Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery. I’m also considering Pirates? In Sausalito? Or Pirates in Sausalito?
The book is fiction, but based on true events, during the 1970s “houseboat wars” in Sausalito. Hippies and artists living on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown face off against city leaders and developers who want to build a luxury harbor on the waterfront, and when the police attempt to evict them, they fight back with street theater, civil disobedience, and monkey-wrenching. Then someone gets stabbed.
Here are my options: my current title, which I’m abandoning, and three new possibilities.
P.S. I’ve been percolating on some tag lines as well, which I may use in the book description on the back cover, on vendor sites like Amazon or even on the front cover.
Here are two of them. I’d love to hear what you think.
Not a True Story, But Based on True Events
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Murder, She Wrote
On September 21, I’ll be part of a local author panel at the Mill Valley Library discussing researching and writing about California. I’ll be discussing my 2015 novel Wasted, a “green-noir” mystery set in the garbage and recycling world of Berkeley, as well as my work-in-progress, a historical mystery/comedy based on true events in Sausalito during the houseboat wars in the 1970s. (I’m adapting this novel from “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery,” the play I wrote and directed this past spring in Tam Valley.)
The event is free. Hope to see you there. Register here.
The panel is a partnership with California Writers Club Marin and the Mill Valley Library.
Because I’ll be talking about Wasted, I am percolating, again, on whether or not to redesign its cover, which you can see below.
Wasted is the first novel I wrote — it took more than ten years — and I sometimes think of it as a “lesser” work than my other two novels. (It sold fewer copies and garnered fewer reviews than my other two novels, though I read it again recently and was thrilled with how entertaining it is and how well it captures the zeitgeist of Berkeley, from its recycling movement to its contradictions to its high self-regard.)
But the cover is a problem.
Set in the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling, Wasted explores rich and resonant themes of reinvention, transition, and discarding that which no longer serves us.
Berkeley reporter Brian Hunter investigates the “recycling wars,” finds the body of his friend Doug crushed in an aluminum bale, and hunts down the murderer, all the while trying to win the heart of Barb, Doug’s former lover, now a suspect in his murder.
Part mystery, part love triangle, and part political satire, Wasted asks the age-old question: How do I act with truth and integrity, make the world a better place, and still get laid?
I designed the cover — I’ve been a graphic designer for decades — and I was happy with it. At first. I thought it was crisp and clean and memorable.
So much so I entered it in Joel Friedlander’s monthly ebook cover design contest on thebookdesigner.com.
Here’s his critique:
This is a very common situation in which a skilled graphic designer brings those skills into book cover design, which is much more tied to conventions.
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.
Ouch!
As I’ve learned in the years since, the main job of the cover is to tell potential readers what kind of book it is. I’ve failed on that front — Wasted is not a corporate publication or a recycling textbook.
Over the years, I’ve tried other designs, but have not been happy with any of them.
First, I added blood. Better? At first I thought so, but I was not convinced enough to upload the new cover to KDP.
Then I tried the industrial warehouse look. Too busy and ugly. Not an improvement. Though arguably better at telegraphing what kind of book it is.
More recently, because I’m ordering copies to sell at the upcoming panel discussion, I went back to the original, with the recycling arrows, but also with a hint of suspense. Specifically, a woman with a flashlight. I also integrated a corrugated metal warehouse into the background.
I’m leaning toward the one on the right, with the woman with the flashlight in the center. Or rather I was. More on that in a minute.
This past Saturday morning, at the monthly BAIPA meeting, I shared the covers above as part of “Five-Minute Feedback,” and was shocked by the consensus of the group. During our brief discussion, turned out that many people liked the cover I referred to as “ugly,” with the broken windows and bloody hands. But I hadn’t even included it in my final four for the poll. We added as it choice E, and it “won” 70 percent of the vote.
Wow. What an eye-opener. I was so sure the last cover, the woman with the flashlight inside the recycling arrows, would get the most votes. (It got 17 percent.) But that’s because I couldn’t let go of the recycling arrows. Based on the discussion and the poll, one reason the “ugly” choice may have won is because it did not have the recycling arrows, except in a much less prominent way.
I’ve since received several follow-up emails with additional feedback, including one who suggested that I not listen to the 70 percent.
I’m going to sit with all this for a few more days, and I welcome additional feedback in the comments or via email — johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
I love designing book covers. But geez, it is hard!
P.S. I also got an email yesterday from someone I designed a book cover for earlier, reiterating how much he and others like the design. So it’s not like I strike out all the time. 🙂
In May, I presented “When Plots Collide — Create Suspenseful Page-Turners by Weaving Multiple Storylines” to the San Joaquin Writers, for the first time since my first time, back in 2017, and it went swimmingly enough I thought I’d write about it for the Bulletin.
Writing formulas are tricky — I find many of them useful, but if you stick to them too rigorously, you end up sounding, well, formulaic.
That said, almost all good stories have formulas and the trick is to write them so they seem fresh, even if the plots are ones we’ve seen before.
You’ve all seen colliding plots in action — it’s a formula used extensively on crime shows, like “Law and Order.” The book or the TV show starts with a couple of unrelated stories, but you know they’re going to bump into each other. Other shows that come to mind: “House of Cards,” “Downton Abbey,” “Breaking Bad.”
The trick is to use the formula so each story impacts the others and amps up the suspense. I’ll be mapping out the plot of Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant 1987 novel about New York City, to demonstrate.
(You don’t have to have read the book, but I highly recommend it.)
The protagonist of Bonfire is Sherman McCoy, a white, late-thirties bond trader who makes a million dollars a year, but is hemorrhaging money — on his Park Avenue coop, his wife’s extravagant decorating, his daughter’s private school, his Mercedes. The story kicks into high gear when he drives his Mercedes to JFK to pick up his mistress and on the way home they get lost in the Bronx. When he gets out of his car to move a tire in the road, he sees two young black kids approaching. They seem menacing. One asks, “Yo, need some help?” Assuming they’re predators, he throws the tire at them, jumps in the car — his mistress has taken the wheel — and as she fishtails away, Sherman hears a thunk. They escape.
Sherman is distressed. Did they hit one of the boys? Is he hurt? He searches the news reports, wonders if he should go to the police. He screws up one of his bond deals because he’s so distracted.
While Sherman stews, the book switches focus to other characters, starting with Reverend Reginald Bacon, a black minister who received $350,000 from a church to build a daycare center, but the money’s gone, nothing’s been built, and he’s in trouble.
Enter Annie Lamb, mother of the boy hit by Sherman’s Mercedes in the Bronx. Her son Henry is in intensive care, in a coma. Annie goes to Reverend Bacon for help, and he sees an opportunity to challenge the justice system for always putting people of color behind bars. How about this Mercedes driver who was white? The boy got a partial read on the license plate.
Then we jump to the district attorney’s office, where Abe Weiss, white and Jewish, is facing re-election in a primarily black and Latino borough, and there’s nothing that would help him more than what he calls “the great white hope” — a high-profile case with a white defendant. We follow Larry Kramer, a mid-level DA, who starts tracking down the Mercedes involved in the hit-and-run. He’s got a crush on a woman on one of his juries, a woman with brown lipstick, and he wants to make a name for himself.
But there’s more — a drunk, broke has-been British reporter, Peter Fallows, whose main goal is to figure out who he can cadge drinks and dinner from at his favorite watering holes. He interviews Annie Lamb, mother of the hit-and-run victim, for a front-page story in City Light.
When Sherman reads that story, he learns there are 500 Mercedes in the New York City area with license plates that start with RF and that the DA is going to investigate them all.
Finally the police visit Sherman, ask to see his car, and he falls apart. The police “know” it’s him. When the DA finds a witness to the hit-and-run to ID Sherman, he’s arrested.
What I love about these colliding plots is how an action in one story causes an action in another. We see Peter Fallows find his journalistic footing and redeem himself with solid reporting and writing. That’s his story. At the same time, his actions tighten the vice around Sherman.
Peter Fallows, Reverend Bacon, and Larry Kramer have their own hungers and hurdles — they don’t care about Sherman per se, they don’t even know who he is — but the more success they achieve chasing their goals, the more trouble they cause for Sherman. So even though Sherman is not a likable character, I found myself sympathizing with his plight.
There’s an old storytelling adage that you should chase your protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at him. Keep the trouble coming, and your readers will keep turning the pages. The crux of this plot-colliding formula is that you’re throwing rocks at the protagonist even when he or she is not on the page. It’s as if your protagonist has a musical theme, and during those times when you’re following the other characters’ stories, you’d hear a faint refrain of that riff.
During the school year, I’m a crossing guard — an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon — and twice every weekday I walk to and from my corner, which adds up to five miles, more when I swung by Coyote Coffee to sit outside and schmooze with the regulars.
Now it’s summer and I’m off, along with the students and teachers, and I also have this nerve pain in my left leg — sciatica, I think — so I’m cutting back on my walking, and instead I’m bicycling to libraries or coffee shops with my laptop. I’m retired, but busy — I have a couple of paid gigs, like designing a book about “dying gladly” by a man who’s dying. And I’m writing, in fits and starts, the last two chapters of my comic novel about the houseboat wars in Sausalito, tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story.
(The novel is based on a play I wrote and directed this past spring for our local community theater troupe — Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, which you can see here. Or scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Which brings me to “Ted Lasso” and the two audiobooks I’ve recently listened to — Grapes of Wrath and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The paid gigs, the novel I’m struggling to finish, the shows I’m watching, and the books I’m listening to — these things have converged by accident, not by design.
The theme of June so far seems to be “the end.” End of the school year. End of life. End of a TV series. End of books.
I know I’m late to unpack the final season of “Ted Lasso,” which, if you’ve recently crawled out of hibernation, is a popular streaming TV series about an American college football coach hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, even though he has no soccer experience. The team owner, Rebecca Walton, hires him because she hopes to sabotage the team, which used to be owned by her ex-husband, but Ted, who is goofy and cheesy and overly optimistic, turns out to be a successful coach.
The third and allegedly last season recently ended, and I was in tears during the final few episodes. In a good way. It was schmaltzy, to be sure, and the writers trotted out plenty of well-worn tropes, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny and touching in a way that didn’t feel manipulative.
What I appreciated about the “Ted Lasso” ending was how, over the last several episodes, we see the end of a journey for so many of the characters, even minor ones. Like Nate, the underdog former kit man turned boy genius coach turned villain. He quits his high-profile West Ham coaching gig because it turns out he has principles after all.
There were some touches I very much liked in the series, like the “Diamond Dogs,” an impromptu men’s group that Ted and several others convene in their office as necessary to discuss intimate issues like relationships. In the last episode, the sneering, always-swearing, tough-guy coach, Roy Kent, who has previously left the room whenever the Diamond Dogs gathered, says he wants in.
The last episode follows the usual sports story formula, with the team winning a pivotal game, but “Ted Lasso” manages to scratch that itch, without buying into the idea that winning it all is the only honorable end.
The mania that a team can stir up is real and it was fun to watch the watchers of that last game, like Sharon, the former team therapist, jumping up and down on her bed, and Ted’s son and ex-wife, watching from their couch in Kansas City, lumps in their throats.
Which brings me to Grapes of Wrath, which I read fifty years ago and barely remember. But I remember the ending, which was shocking then and still shocking now.
Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family as they leave their drought-stricken, dust-bowl, bank-repossessed farm in Oklahoma, during the Depression, and head to California, where they hear there’s plenty of work and you can pick oranges to eat right off the trees. Of course, when they arrive, there are more workers than jobs, the wages are low, and the farm bosses are cruel. The migrants set up camps along creek beds in little Hoovervilles, and struggle to make enough to feed their families.
As the book draws to a close, Tom Joad, the prodigal son who starts the book returning to his family’s abandoned farm after a stint in jail for killing a man, has gotten himself into trouble again and is hiding from the police. The rest of the family has worked a few days here and there and now there’s no more work and winter’s coming and the rain falls for days and the camp is flooding. Meanwhile Tom’s younger sister, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, whose husband has recently abandoned her, delivers a stillborn baby in the migrant camp. The floodwaters keep rising and Ma Joad is determined to get the weak Rose of Sharon to higher ground. They find a barn that’s dry, and inside meet a young man and his starving father. The father has been giving what little food he has to his son and now he’s dying. At Ma Joad’s urging, Rose of Sharon feeds the dying man her breast milk. That’s how it ends. She pulls his head to her breast and smiles.
But there’s no resolution to the rest of the story. None of the main characters’ journeys are tied up. We don’t know how the family will eat or find work or what they salvage from the flooding, or what will happen to Tom, who is on the lam from the law.
Amidst this bleakness, however, there is this glimmer of hope, in Rose of Sharon’s act of kindness, saving the man’s life with her milk. It’s an affirmation of the human spirit.
I’d forgotten how strident and outspoken John Steinbeck was about the oppressors and the oppressed, the evil capitalists and humble and virtuous Okies like the Joad family. Some say he oversimplifies and paints the world in black and white, and maybe so, but there’s plenty of truth in his words and he tells a memorable and almost mythological story. Highly recommended.
I listened to Grapes of Wrath in two spurts, because my library audiobook loan period ended when I was three-quarters of the way through and I couldn’t renew it because another patron had it on hold.
Looking for another audiobook, I stumbled on On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an achingly poignant 2019 autobiographical novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong. It could not be more different than Grapes of Wrath, except that, coincidentally, the protagonist, “Little Dog,” was briefly a migrant farm worker — picking tobacco as a teenager in Connecticut.
The novel is a letter from Little Dog to his illiterate mother, who left Vietnam when he was a baby, with her mother, who had survived as a prostitute during the Vietnam War. It’s poetic and nonlinear, occasionally difficult to follow, but brutally honest, emotionally powerful, and dazzlingly written. Little Dog recounts how he is treated abusively by his traumatized mother, who works in a nail salon, and discovers he is gay as a teenager when he works on the tobacco farm and meets a young white man, Trevor, whose grandfather is the owner.
Vuong jumps back and forth from the nail salon to the tobacco barn to the apartment in Hartford where he lives with his mother and grandmother, to the bar in Vietnam where his grandmother meets an American soldier. Often, because I was listening instead of reading, I lost track of where we were.
This book also does not end as much as stops, after Little Dog’s grandmother Lan dies and he accompanies his mother back to Vietnam to bury Lan’s ashes. That night, Little Dog wakes and goes outside to see music and dancing in the streets, and remembers a conversation with his mother, and how she laughs, but he doesn’t remember why.
Like Grapes of Wrath, there’s plenty of tragedy, and the book doesn’t ends with a plot climax, but more of an emotional epiphany.
Listening to these books, mostly while walking, created an immersiveness that was almost more intimate than reading. Ocean Vuong narrates his own book, and does a admirable job, though not like the virtuoso narration of Grapes of Wrath, by Dylan Baker, who delineates the many characters’ voices masterfully.
(By the way, I still read books, print and digital, but lately, the only books I’m reading are about writing. About endings, in particular.)
This brings me, finally, to my own unfinished novel and since I’ve written more than 1,500 words here already, I’ll keep it brief.
Here’s my synopsis of the story: Hippie squatter houseboaters resist greedy developers. Then someone gets stabbed. The story is made up, but based on true events from the late 1970s, a few miles from where I now live.
I’m struggling with my ending now, and while I’m aiming for the “Ted Lasso” wrap-up, I can’t stop longing for an ending like Grapes of Wrath, something readers might remember fifty years later, like I did.
There are only so many kinds of endings, though endless variations. There’s the happily-ever-after ending common to romances, where everything is resolved. There are the unresolved or ambiguous endings, where the reader can only speculate about what happens next. Like Grapes of Wrath. There are the unexpected endings, the gut-punches, which often rely on a plot twist, and I love those, especially when they surprise me and at the same time seem inevitable. But it’s daunting to come up with a twist that’s new and fresh.
There are also endings that circle back to the beginning. Like when the last line is something like, “so I wrote it all down so everyone would know.” I enjoy those too, but as with the twists, it’s hard to avoid sounding stale. In On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog circles back to the beginning. With memories, laughter, and celebration.
Most mysteries end with the identification of the killer, but I’ve made my life more difficult by telling two overlapping stories — the showdown over the shantytown houseboats and the murder that comes out of that fight. I could end once the police chief baits and traps the murderer, but there are other stories I want to resolve.
Then there are epilogues, which show the reader where the character(s) end up, months later, even years later. It might be a brief scene, or, like in some movies, there’s a list of characters and where they ended up, who they married, when they died.
My three previous novels ended with epilogues, which were several pages and jumped months ahead and tied up a few loose ends. I’m happy with them, and that was my leaning with this work-in-progress. But because I have nine characters narrating chapters from their points of view and I’d like a satisfying ending for as many of them as possible, and I want some twists, I have ended up three epilogues, which are too long and have too much action to be epilogues. They are more like “false summits” — that’s when you approach the top of the mountain peak only to find that it’s not the peak, that, oh no, there’s more steep climbing ahead. That’s not what I want readers to feel at the end.
Of course, when I do write the ending, I won’t be finished. I have to go back to the beginning and edit and rewrite the whole manuscript at least one more time before it’s ready. Which gives me plenty more time to percolate on the ending.
Here are two videos, one inspired by Grapes of Wrath — The Ghost of Tom Joad, by Bruce Springsteen — and the other the play I wrote and directed earlier this year — “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery.”
Here are some highlights — in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. 🙂
Scene 3 (The Greedy Developer and the Liberal Police Chief) 7:24
Scene 4 (The Vengeful Ex-Wife Confronts the Mistress) 12:28
Scene 6 (Eviction Raid) 24:20 (includes sword fight)
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.
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