A cutlass descends and the hand of merchant banker Isaac Randall is severed at the wrist. The pirate captain holds it high, removes the ring, and flips the hand over the rail. As his wife, Betsy, watches helplessly, the prancing pirates lift her three young children—Alice, Mary, and the baby, David—and finally Isaac himself and throw each of them into the sea.
Now it was 2003, and the president was sending America back to the gulf to clean up his father’s unfinished business. Barliant was about 75 pages into her book when “suddenly it hit me like someone threw a bucket of water at me that I was writing about the Iraq war.” It was a war of choice, and she dreaded it. “I was not going to write an Iraq war novel,” she tells me, “but I could write this novel, so I did.”
Her husband had a different idea. A former federal bankruptcy judge, Ron Barliant was winding down his law practice, and with time on his hands he decided to publish it himself. That’s not hard to do, he says, if you settle for a second-class production, but he didn’t intend to. Primarily by looking online, he rounded up copy editors, proofreaders, a cover designer, an interior designer, and a printer, Ingram, that not only prints on demand—meaning no heap of unsold copies in the author’s basement—but is one of the world’s largest book distributors. Ron’s cousin, Don Barliant, and his wife, Janet Bailey, read One Day’s Tale, and because they liked it the book is now on the shelves of Barbara’s Bookstores, which they own. It’s also for order online and as an e-book, and Ron has signed up a marketer with ideas on how to promote it. He decided to call the imprint Austin Lamp Press, honoring the light-fixture shop his late father ran in Chicago for half a century.
