On May 1, I gave a presentation at the Mill Valley Library: ”Sausalito Houseboat Wars: What Really Happened?” Not only was I thrilled by the turnout and how well it went, the library recorded the talk and I just watched the video and it’s pretty compelling. Special thanks to Franklin Walther, Digital Services Librarian, for a fantastic job editing the video and integrating the slides into the narration.
Last fall, anticipating I would be finished with my novel, Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, I pitched a librarian on hosting an event, and she connected me with the Mill Valley Historical Society. They asked me to talk more about the history my book is based on than about the novel itself. I was wary, but it was a brilliant idea — we had a full house, in the main reading room. It’s unlikely that many people would have come if I were talking only about my book.
Here is the video, which is 50 minutes long. I’ve posted highlights below.
I have two more author talks scheduled, which will be similar to the Mill Valley Library event. Because that event was part of the Mill Valley Historical Society’s First Wednesday series, it was 95 percent history and 5 percent my book. For these upcoming events, I will continue to devote most of my time to the real history, but will give a bit more time to reading from and talking about my book.
Sausalito Houseboat Wars: What Really Happened?
June 6 (Thursday), 6:30 pm SAUSALITO LIBRARY, 420 Litho St.
June 9 (Sunday), 4 pm TAM VALLEY CABIN, 60 Tennessee Valley Road, Mill Valley
Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery
It’s the 1970s, and the “houseboat wars” erupt in Sausalito on the site of Marinship, the abandoned World War II shipyard. Hippies and squatters are living free and easy on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown, and greedy developers are determined to evict them and build new docks to attract affluent residents.
The counterculture is in full flower and the houseboaters, fearing their community will be destroyed, resist eviction with street theater, civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, and more. Like climbing into dinghies and pushing away police boats with oars. Like sinking a barge to block a pile driver. All in front of TV cameras!
Then, someone gets stabbed.
Pirates of Sausalito is fiction, but inspired by true events. As Larry Clinton, former president of the Sausalito Historical Society, said, “If it didn’t happen exactly this way, it could have.”
Imagine Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Murder, She Wrote. One part hippies grooving on the waterfront and fighting the man, one part murder mystery.
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.
It’s the 1970s, and the “houseboat wars” erupt in Sausalito on the site of Marinship, the abandoned World War II shipyard. Hippies and squatters are living free and easy on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown, and greedy developers are determined to evict them and build new docks to attract affluent residents.
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