William C. Barnwell

Welcome

William Barnwell is the author of eight novels. He was born in Macon, Georgia, spent two years in Oregon, and grew up in North Alabama on the Tennessee River. As a kid, he read lots of stuff on the weekend, often under a blanket with a flashlight. Early on, he won prizes in creative writing. He attended undergraduate school in Memphis, Tennessee, working with Jack Farris at Rhodes College and later teaching with Harry Crews at the University of Florida.

His first academic job was at the University of South Carolina. When his first novel, The Blessing Papers, was released in England in 1980, he became visiting writer-in-residence at Columbia College, a private all-girls school in Columbia, SC.

Barnwell has published a number of articles and reviews in academic journals about the Nobel-prize winning poet William Yeats, and an Irish novelist, Francis Stuart, who lived in Berlin during WWII and broadcast propaganda against England (Ireland was neutral in that war). Barnwell has also published prize-winning poems and short stories. He was the Director of the regional 1984 Conference on the Humanities and Technology in the South. Leslie Fiedler spoke on George Orwell's famous novel 1984, and Alvin Toffler made predictions on the future. The outcome of such a binary conference was clear: Technology won. Since 1984, he has delivered many papers on popular culture and technology and was president of a software company when Microsoft was just getting to windows.

Simon & Schuster bought the paperback rights of The Blessing Papers and contracted Barnwell for three more in a science-fantasy series that was well received. His fifth novel, The Scheme-of-the-Month Club, was reviewed as being a "comic romp" in South Carolina doing what Carl Hiaasen does in Florida.

His sixth novel, The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High, is a YA novel about the failure of learning while mired in federal regulations that demanded by decree that "excellence" and "high expectations" would rise yearly with only a hint to most students about what that might mean. Such demands were always rising, but the students felt that they, as students, were always falling. This did not make for fertile learning ground. In addition, a fear of something horrible lurking somewhere in the school's basement was pervasive, but denied, until a fateful decision was made.

He is serializing his seventh novel in eBook form, a science-fantasy novel he had started years before entitled, I, Lord Several. A portion of this novel is posted at his website: williambarnwell.net.

His eighth novel, The Camel's Child, involves the WWI desert legend Lawrence of Arabia, reincarnated as a hardcore villain in our time and an idiot savant of killing. What can the hero do when all the oil in the entire Arabian Peninsula is close to being blown up, and Lawrence of Arabia is after him to stop him?

He is at work on his ninth novel with the current title: Red Toe Nails.


Barnwell is a member of the Authors Guild and the International Thriller Writers group (ITW). He is currently working on his ninth novel, a PI thriller, Red Toe Nails. An excerpt of that book is included in Works.



Four of the novels listed below are Simon & Schuster contracted novels. The English first edition hardback of The Blessing Papers and the originals in the Blessing series are available at rare book sites. All five reprints can be seen and bought at, for example, www.bn.com or www.amazon.com, search: william barnwell or william c barnwell

Non-fiction:

Journalism (On the first space shuttle launch, Columbia, April 12, 1981)
Critical Articles on Irish Writers: WB Yeats and Francis Stuart
Book Reviews of academic works

Fiction:

The Blessing Papers, 1980
Imram, 1980
The Sigma Curve, 1981
Book of the Romes, 1985
Scheme-of-the-Month Club, 2002
The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High (Kindle ebook 2011)
The Camel's Child (ebook format 2011)
I, Lord Several (serialized as eBook 2012)
Red Toe Nails (In Progress)

Coffee Short Story award: "The High Eagle Trail"
Poetry: The Suburb of Ideas and Other Poems, including the USC
prize-winning "Krystal Burger"
A score of papers delivered about High Technology and the Humanities in our time

Want to know what's going on in inner-city high schools during these days of great expectations, increasing excellence, and no-excuses accountability? Read The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High and find out.


What if all oil might be suddenly blown off the table if you don't stop it? And what if your dead sister is trying to get you to do just that? You are one heck of a jock, but a new Lawrence of Arabia is your opponent. What do you stand for against a sadistic idiot savant of killing who thinks like you do?

Part 1. A new subspecies is engineered to survive without man's help. Part man, part insect. They are bred to be super salesmen. What are they trying to sell? Like Victorian novels back in the day, this novel is being serialized in eBook format. Watch for Part 2 soon


Watch this site for discussions about current trends in the e-novel and excerpts from upcoming work.

And, by the way:

WhitePages LogoName Information
William
Barnwell
Meaning

(male) Probably the most successful of all the Old French names of Germanic origin that were introduced to England by the Normans. It is derived from Germanic wil ‘will, desire’ + helm ‘helmet, protection’. The fact that it was borne by the Conqueror himself does not seem to have inhibited its favour with the ‘conquered’ population: in the first century after the Conquest it was the commonest male name of all, and not only among the Normans. In the later Middle Ages it was overtaken by John, but continued to run second to that name until the 20th century, when the picture became more fragmented.

Short forms: Will, Bill.

Pet forms: Willy, Willie, Billy.

Cognates: Irish: Uilliam. Scottish Gaelic: Uilleam. Welsh: Gwilym. German: Wilhelm. Dutch: Willem. Scandinavian: Vilhelm. French: Guillaume. Spanish: Guilermo. Catalan: Guillem. Portuguese: Guilherme. Italian: Guglielmo. Czech: Vilém. Slovenian: Viljem. Hungarian: Vilmos. Lithuanian: Vilhelmas. Latvian: Vilhelms.

Meaning

English: habitational name from a place so called; there is one in Cambridgeshire and another in Northamptonshire, both named with Old English beorn ‘warrior’ (genitive plural beorna) or the Old English personal name Beorna + well(a) ‘stream’.

FOREBEARS A John Barnwell (c.1671–1724) emigrated to SC from Ireland at the end of the 17th century.

William Barnwell on WhitePages

A contemporary mystery based on money, love, and death. What more could you want?
A look at new human motives extended into a world of shrinking species.
A contemporary thriller. See insert of part of Chapter 1.
When a group of over-the-hill entrepreneurs are working on at least one scheme a month, one of them has to work, right?
This novel is a prequel to the Blessing Papers series when an ancestor discovers a living metal that can destroy the world and the Blessing family vows to stop it.
With the loss of the ability to read, the world disintegrates. In the afterlife, in an Ireland of the future, a young man searches for reasons for the Fall and how to put it back together.
With all his doubts, how will Turly Vail/Blessing safely unlock the precious secret of the Blessing Papers?
Turly Blessing makes his way through arid valleys and the Lower Mountains, and his courage becomes the final test for the future of all things in the rise and fall of the sigma curve.
Young Adult Novel
A story about new challenges and how they are met or not met at an inner-city school. See insert of Chapter 1.
Writing as a craft
Some of the ins and outs of writing fiction or nonfiction. Find and buy my books and other good books here and at the web address: http://www.amazon.com/William-Barnwell/e/B001KE4LK0