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
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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