Moving into the future can mean a bumpy ride

Muskingum River Power Plant

Some days are bummer days.

I just read a news story on the Marietta Times website that says American Electric Power’s Muskingum River power plant’s Unit 5 in Southern Ohio will shut down by 2015.

That means the loss of more than 100 jobs at the plant located a couple of miles north of Beverly. I went to Fort Frye High School in Beverly and know many people who did or are working at the AEP coal-burning plant that straddles the Muskingum River.



Yes, I know the nation is transitioning to cleaner fuel sources, but this news still leaves me in a melancholy mood.

View from Muskingum River

I’ve had jobs vanish in this struggling economy and know it’s hard to get work that pays a comparable salary.



I first saw the plant’s smokestack towering above the hills as the family car traveled along curvy Ohio 339 toward the back entrance into Beverly. That was 1968. Dad had a new job at the B.F. Goodrich plant in Marietta, and we were moving from Wadsworth, Ohio, near Akron down to Beverly.



Through the years the tall stack has been a welcome sight as I traveled not only on Ohio 339 but Ohio 60 down from McConnelsville.

The summer after high school graduation I played softball on a baseball field owned by AEP’s subsidiary, Ohio Power. The field lay beside the bank of the Muskingum River under the shadows of the plant.

If you didn’t park your car in the garage in the late ‘60s, you’d find a coating of coal ash on it when you went out to start it in the morning. We were breathing that into our lungs.

On some Saturdays in the mid ‘70s, I’d drive from Lancaster where I was a newspaper reporter to Beverly to visit family. The 1.5-hour trip took me past New Lexington and a nearby strip-mining operation, one of the feeder systems for the Muskingum River plant and others that depend on coal to generate electricity.



Unit 5 is shutting down by mid-2015 because AEP just inked a legal settlement with the U.S. EPA, eight states and 13 citizen environmental groups to end operation of some its oldest, dirtiest coal-burning plants. The Muskingum River plant is one of them.

Beverly, Ohio

The news isn’t unexpected in the Muskingum River Valley. Back in June 2011 the company first announced that the plant was on a list of units to be retired by 2015. It didn’t go over well with Beverly friends I’ve friended on Facebook, and many lambasted the EPA, the Obama Administration and Democrats in the Congress. They took it personally. Through the decades the power plant and a steel plant on the river were important income generators for Beverly and the sister town on the western bank of the Muskingum, Waterford.

But technological change stops for no one. The U.S. is moving toward natural gas and alternative energy like solar farms for electric generation. As part of the legal settlement, AEP has made a commitment to develop 50 megawatts of wind or solar power this year, and additional 150 megawatts by 2015.

The first four of the plant’s units were commissioned between 1953 and 1958, and are scheduled for closure by 2014. Unit 5 was built in 1968, and could be converted to natural gas, but that would probably not be economical for AEP.

As a reporter for the Duplin Times in North Carolina, I cover the Duplin County towns of Wallace and Rose Hill where I am witnessing the transition to alternate energy sources. Both towns are in the process of approving solar farms. Earlier this month the developers of the solar farm on the edge of Wallace came back with a revised conditional use permit. They had to change the footprint of their farm to move solar panels away from wetlands.

Solar farm in North Carolina

Photovoltaic power (PV) solar panels convert sunlight into electricity that can be sold to utility or private companies. A smaller number of solar farms use CSP technology that captures and concentrates the sun’s heat to create electricity. CSP systems direct solar thermal or heat energy from mirrors and lenses to a steam turbine that drives an electric turbine generator.

A solar farm is considered a utility-scale solar power plant if it is selling power to a utility, is ground-mounted and larger than 2 MW (megawatts), meaning it’s capable of powering more than 300 average homes.

Growth in North Carolina has been driven by state policy that encourages deployment along with federal incentives. Solar farm owners can receive a federal tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of the system.

Sunlight or coal? What choice would you make?

When actresses first ruled the Social Scene …

“Abandoned pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare relies on her wits, beauty and courage to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England – that of favorite mistress of Merry Monarch Charles II.”

Anyone here in the second decade of the 21^st century know who teenage Amber St. Clare is?

 
Amber is author Kathleen Winsor’s heroine in “Forever Amber,” the bestselling U.S. novel of the 1940s. It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week of release in 1944 and went on to sell more than 3 million copies. More than a few girls born in the mid to late 1940s are named Amber.

I don’t read many romance books, but I did read “Forever Amber” in my early 20s after I saw the movie that starred Linda Darnell as the bed-hopping beauty.



English Stage

What I especially liked was Winsor’s portrayal of the 17^th-century English stage. Nell Gwynne, the actress who became a real mistress of Charles II, even makes an appearance in the novel. Called “pretty, witty Nell” by Samuel Pepys, she has come to be regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England. Considered an extraordinary comic talent, Nell’s rags-to-royalty tale echoes another story made famous by Disney … “Cinderella.”

Nell set the stage for the celebrated actresses of the 18^th-century English stage, the women who helped establish the 18^th century as the Age of the Actress. These actresses achieved star status in that bygone time, much like today’s actresses like Angelina Jolie and Hallie Berry are trend-setters.

Anne Oldfield, Frances Abington and Susannah Cibber have been mostly forgotten, but in another time and place were major players at the dawn of what we know today as Celebrity Worship. They became beacons of style and taste. These actresses had money of their own and exerted political and cultural influence far beyond the stage.

During the 1757-58 season, Susannah Cibber ranked a close second in popularity to David Garrick. This helps explain the jealousy Garrick harbored against his female colleagues throughout his long career.



The Broadsheet Tatler

Both the highborn and the lower classes loved the London stage. The broadsheets of the era loved publicizing the gossip and scandal surrounding the stage. And at the center were the actresses.

No doubt many today think the actresses were like Amber, prepared to offer a special performance in the bed of a wealthy nobleman. That was sometimes true, but the actresses also formed friendships with ladies of quality and were in demand at parties and social events. As one observer said of Abington, “A great number of people of fashion treat her in the most familiar manner, as if she were their equal.” In turn, the ladies of quality shared in the spotlight and cultivated their own spheres of cultural influence.

While these superstar actresses were able to hobnob with noblewomen, they came from lower-class women employed in the trades as milliners, seamstresses, servants and orange girls. Frances Abington was a servant to a French milliner early in her life. Yet she was able to mesh her acting talent with shrewd business acumen to become an 18^th century celebrity.

These stars of the stage refused to classify themselves as immoral or whores. In their autobiographies and memoirs, the actresses used their popularity to depict their sometimes scandalous behavior as socially acceptable. People overlooked Gwynn’s scandalous behavior because of her philanthropy and benevolence. A generation later the fans of the London stage overlooked Oldfield’s wild ways because of her skill and talent on the stage.

 
See … some things never change. 18^th century folks were willing to overlook misdeeds and hanky-panky just like we are.

The online future has a name and it’s called Graph Search…

He’s been making a list, and checking it twice, gonna to find out who’s been naughty or nice.

No, not Santa Claus, but the Wizard of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook’s algorithms have been collecting, cataloguing and storing an immense storehouse of data made possible by a billion people who share their personal lives online on the social network.

They post status updates complete with photos and charts, everything from their latest recipe creations to their day-to-day struggles taking care of a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s.

 Right now folks in the U.S. Northeast are posting photos and comments about Nemo, the latest blizzard now blanketing the region.

I’ve collected 576 friends since I first joined Facebook back in September 2009. On October 4, 2011, I established an author’s page to try to generate some sales of my novels. The page has 716 likes.

I’ve posted hundreds of jpgs over the years – everything from my nieces’ weddings and a new-born great-nephew to some related to my writing, paintings of warrior women that once graced fantasy novels.



The Grand Annoucement

If asked in my more innocent days what I thought happened to all the postings made by people back at the dawn of the Facebook Age, I would have unveiled this scenario.

Zuckerberg frowns, crosses his arms and narrowly eyes one of his server gurus. “We’re out of storage space and the storage tapes just went up in price. Delete January through June 2005.”

I doubt anything like this ever happened. I expect everything you, me and the other billion users posted through the years still exists in the nether regions between the symbols of computer code.

That’s why I’m not the least bit surprised that Facebook is taking on its archrival Google, announcing a search tool – Graph Search – designed to mine all that personal information collected over the years.

I’ve noticed just one person on Facebook, a fellow author, posting worries about Graph Search. That surprises me. I would have thought I’d be seeing a deluge of graphic posts warning about Facebook’s newest assault on privacy.

Maybe people don’t know about Graph Search, even though the search engine was announced with much fanfare. Or maybe people think the privacy controls they’re using will keep Graph Search from turning up more intimate information. What’s a given is that people are more cautious about what they share on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

If you take Facebook at its word, it intends to respect users’ privacy in the brave new world of Graph Search. For example, if a job seeker doesn’t want a risqué photo to be ferreted out by a potential employer, he or she can make it visible only to those who have been winnowed down as “close friends.” Face is advising users to check their privacy settings in order to fine-tune whom they wish to share posts with online.

But even if I’m careful about what photos I post on Facebook and with whom I share the photos with, I can’t control what my Facebook friends post. Let’s say I partied hard in my youth and a friend took some revealing shots of me camped out on a couch groping a female acquaintance now happily married with three children. I’m not friends on FB with this ancient friend, so I don’t know he has posted some “party” shots from olden times including the one of me. Worst yet, he has tagged me. So that photo could very well be ferreted out by Graph Search.

Graph Search is now in beta testing. When it’s fully up and running, it will be the most powerful search engine in existence, dwarfing Google Search. Every time you go to another site and read a news story, for example, then press the site’s Facebook icon, the fact that you “like” the news story is going into Facebook’s immense data that is searchable by Graph Search.

Friends Liking Friends

Facebook graph system has been accumulating information since the day Facebook opened and the first connections were made in the software graph structure. A columnist for Slapdot writes, “I did a search of people who like running and have visited my hometown, and the system produced several dozen people. The information is already there. And these people weren’t on my Friends list, and the few I checked didn’t have any mutual friends with me.”

The Slapdot columnist adds, “For users of Facebook looking to meet more friends, Graph Search might prove interesting and useful. And for law enforcement and other ‘Big Brother’ analyses, it could be a gold mine. People were nervous about Google storing their history, but it pales in comparison to the information Facebook already has on you, me and roughly a billion other people.”

Facebook is hoping Graph Search will make it a whole lot of money. But that will depend on Facebook’s users continuing to share all kinds of stuff with their FB friends – their interests, photos and likes. The beta version doesn’t include status updates, but that will apparently change later on.

On the other hand, Graph Search holds unbridled promise for marketers and advertisers seeking to target more precise audiences. Let’s say I’m the CEO of a corporation that owns two companies; one sells dance outfits for little girls and the other, a company that sells clogging music. I could use Graph Search to find mothers in their 30s who have daughters taking dance lessons.

I could see where Graph Search could be very useful for indie authors and authors under contract to ebook publishers. I could use it to find FB users who are major fans of the fantasy genre, specifically novels with elves and dwarves. Can you spell “future sales?”

These same fantasy genre fans could use Graph Search to find authors like me who are not in the stables of major publishing houses. Can you spell “more future sales?”

So while Graph Search has me nervous, I do see the benefits. And I will keep my posts “public.”

A few words on the new dodo bird …

Some say libraries are going the way of the dodo bird.

The flightless, three-foot-tall bird native to the island of Mauritius near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean became extinct in the late 17^th century due to an aggressive human population.

Today humans are coming up with technologies that have the potential of supplanting the traditional roles of public and college libraries.

When I was in elementary school in Rialto, California, back in the early ‘60s, I loved to read baseball biographies and science fiction and the best place to get them was the school library. The books were free, an important consideration for a family on a limited income. Frankly, I don’t recall going to a bookstore during my elementary school days.

Bodleian Library, Oxford University

Vague memories of a public library in Corona, California, percolate near consciousness, but the strong, undeniable memories belong to the county library system in Washington County, Ohio during my high school years. I didn’t really do research in the main Washington County library or the branch in Beverly, but I did check out science fiction and historical novels and the occasional nonfiction book about a historical event or person.

In college at Ohio University, I relied on Alden Library on the College Green for research papers, combing the stacks for obscure articles and books on long-forgotten Pacific island societies.

I don’t recall buying books at bookstores until I was in high school and would visit a locally owned store in downtown Marietta, Ohio, where I would purchase science fiction paperbacks. That would have been about 1968. I do believe I bought my first fantasy novel in that bookstore, a Conan novel. Back then local bookstores ruled; I don’t recall frequenting a chain bookstore until the early 1980s at the Lake Square Mall in Leesburg, Florida.

So what has changed?

I’m writing this in my office using my Dell laptop. I can keep up with my married or soon-to-be married nieces and their mom – my sister Jody – when they use their cell phones and tablets to post to Facebook. Niece Nicci says she just finished a kettlebell workout with her fiancé Tony. In a few minutes I’ll have to return to writing news stories, and when I do I may need to google to dig up some background for a story. In the old days that would have required a trip to the county or college library.

Libraries are having to adapt to the Information Age and the Online World. In the ancient world onward they were the storehouses of knowledge. The intricate details in award-winning novels and nonfiction books didn’t come out of brains or thin air. They were painstakingly gathered inside libraries. For example, authors who specialize on periods of American history spend hours and hours conducting research in the archives of the Library of Congress.

More and more nowadays, that research can be conducted online from their laptop in their office. It’s not happened yet, but I can see a day coming when libraries everywhere will have their books and research materials on their websites. Their patrons will be able to freely download a book or magazine to their e-readers for a week or two. The only people who will drive to a “physical” library will be those too poor to afford a computer or e-reader or elderly person who won’t learn these new fangled ways.

Libraries are also getting swept up into the conservative vs. liberal debate that has turned discourse into a mud-hole catfight. Libertarians and tea-partiers don’t like the idea of using tax dollars to support anything beyond basic services – not even libraries. In Florida during a debate, one guy said, “…most librarians are little more than unionized pawns for the social activist bosses of the American Library Association. Today ALA controls 62,000 members, and through its czarist accreditation program of many libraries, largely dictates what books are available for the most impressionable members of U.S. society, our children.”

When someone uses the word “czarist” to describe a library association with no power, you can’t help but conclude that public discourse has indeed entered the loony bin.

Ideological arguments against libraries by their very nature are impossible to refute. Any attempt to refute a basic tenant of ideology will fail … the believer will not yield to evidence.

In 20 years, public libraries may be almost entirely online, with only a token building open to the refuseniks who will not use computers or electronic reading devices. And that token building could very well disappear along with the refuseniks.

 

In some places it’s already happening. Every year in Duplin County, North Carolina, the county commissioners try to zero out money for the libraries. So far the money has been reinstated. So far….

Free ebooks … a successful marketing tool?

It’s called marketing – and no, I don’t have one of my novels available for a free download on Amazon. There’s a lively discussion on Facebook started by a New York Times best-selling author. The romance author, who has been able to make a living writing novels for 20 years, wrote: As a writer, “I am SO offended by other writers giving away what they write I could scream.”

She continued, “It makes no sense to work day and night to make a product as good as you can make it, and then put it on the market knowing it's going to be buried by all the free books people are giving away."  as good as you can make it, and then put it on the market knowing it's going to be buried by all the free books people are giving away.”asasas good as you can make it, and then put it on the market knowing it's going to be buried by all the free books people are giving away.”as good as you can make it, and then put it on the market knowing it's going to be buried by all the free books people are giving away.”as good as you can make it, and then put it on the market KNOWING it's going to be buried by all the free books people are giving away.”

Her opinion generated plenty of comments – 106 all told. When she read the comments by readers and fellow writers, some contending giveaways are a good marketing tool, the popular author made a second posting. “I knew posting that earlier status would cause a stink. I am well aware of all the people doing free books and why they're doing free books and why they think it's a good idea and it still doesn't change one damn thing about what I think.” This time she received 70 comments.

I’m not an indie writer. I might try it if I get a large fan base. That way I’ll see a larger slice of the profit pie. My publisher tried a giveaway twice on holidays. They’re not doing it anymore. I wish the publisher had more resources to devote to marketing, but like so many ebook publishers nowadays, they don’t. They stress that authors have to pitch in and help market their novels.

What I see here on Facebook are indie authors making postings every time they have a freebie day or get a five-star review. There so seems to be a lot of freebies and five-star reviews. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of five-star reviews on Amazon. I have the inkling that many of them come from friends and fellow writers who want to help out the author. Another author who is a Facebook friend, Nadine Hays, was the lucky recipient of a review in the USA Today newspaper; that’s the best kind of favorable marketing and no doubt translated into many sales for her.

To me, a review in a national publication or even the local daily newspaper can be very effective in snagging more sales. Getting a local newspaper and radio/television station to mention a book signing at the public library or bookstore also can result in your novel settling into the eager hands of a potential future fan. Then word-of-mouth can take over – as reading addicts usually have friends who are read addicts as well.

I do blog, but I stay away from “how-to-write” posts. They’re way too dry and frankly there are way too many writer blogs telling fellow writers how to develop tension, characters and mood. Who wants to be one of the sand particles on the beach?

When I do post a blog or write something on my Facebook author page, I will try to link to it from one of the Facebook pages like “Books Gone Viral” and “Book Blogs and Tours.” Still, I’m not sure how effective they are. I sense that many of the writers posting on these pages don’t actually click on fellow writers’ links and read their blogs. They’re too busy marketing themselves. Now a mention or link by a popular blogger – and they’re out there – can be a godsend for a first-time author trying to make a splash in the ocean of published novels.

Lindsay Buroker is a successful blogger and indie author. Even before she became a self-published author – and a good one – she blogged about ways to make money online and garnered a readership. She now uses her blogs to market her fantasy novels and has been kind enough to link to other blogs of her author friends including me. Lindsay and I use to critique each other’s chapters on the Online Workshop of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror. Unlike many indie authors whose books are cluttered with grammatical errors, her novels are clean, well written and fun reads. Her website -- http://www.lindsayburoker.com -- includes paintings of her characters done by fans.

There are thousands and thousands and thousands of Ebooks on websites like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ITunes and Smashwords. An author needs to find a way to outshine the others. Let’s use the timeless metaphor of the lit candle. Being an author nowadays is like being in a Christmas Eve church service holding an unlit candle. You need to make sure you sit in the first pew in the seat closest to the middle aisle. That way your candle will be the first one lit and will shine the only candlelight in the sanctuary. While you outshine the others, you need to make a few sales and win some fans.

Remembering horror and forgiveness...

Just six days ago Terri Roberts spoke at a Pennsylvania church about forgiveness and Christian love.

Terri is the mother of Charles Carl Roberts who back in October 2006 took 10 Amish girls between the ages of six and 13 hostage at the Nic...

Amish families showed Terri Roberts the power of forgiveness.

kel Mines Amish School and killed five of them before killing himself.

As she spoke in the church, she recalled hearing sirens on that fall day and saw helicopters racing across the sky. In response, she said a prayer, “Lord, please be with those people who need you.”

Soon, the phone rang at the office where she worked. It was her husband telling her she needed to come home immediately. In her car driving home she heard on the radio about a shooting at an Amish school.

When she got home, her husband and a state trooper met her.
“It’s Charlie. It was Charlie,” her husband told her, his eyes reflecting his soul’s pain.

How does a mother cope with the news that her son had shot 10 little girls and killed five of them?

“No, no, no, no,” she said. “This cannot be the man we know.”

Shattered, Terri had little desire to keep living. The deeply religious woman turned to her faith. She asked God “to take the pierces and put them back together, to bring new things” into her life.

Terri didn’t think she could ever face her Amish friends again. Instead, they came to her.

On the day of the shooting, an Amish neighbor stood behind her husband and rubbed his shoulders, consoling. She says that action symbolized Amish faith and the breadth of their forgiveness.

When Terri and her husband buried their son, the first parents to greet them at the graveside were the mother and father of two daughters killed by their eldest son.

When Terri finished speaking at the church, the congregation’s pastor said, “The Amish reaction to the shooting was amazing because it was instant. Their forgiveness transcends.”

My mom’s side of the family comes from Wayne County, Ohio and were Mennonites and shared Anabaptist roots with the Amish back in Switzerland. I deeply respect the Amish/Mennonite faith, even their pacifist ways. They have gone to jail rather than take up the gun and fight in our wars.

The Amish response to their killings can be a shining light in the darkness of despair for the families of those who lost their lives Friday in the Newtown elementary school massacre.

Christmas memories settle comfortably in our hearts

Mom passed away 11 days before her 74th birthday and less than five weeks before her favorite holiday, Christmas.

2003 proved to be a difficult year. We watched mom lose the ability to use her muscles as ALS inexorably took her away from us. In her last months of her life, she communicated by nodding for "yes" and shaking her head for "no." Emptying the urine bag, changing the bedsore bandage, telling her we were sorry as we turned her on her side awhile she screamed ... those were our daily tasks in the fall of 2003.

 
It ended at midnight on November 14 when she turned her head as if looking at someone in the room and the next breath I waited to hear never happened. I rose from her reading chair, kissed her forehead, and said I loved her and would soon join her in Heaven.

I went into the living room and told my sister Jody and her husband Larry that mom had passed. In turn, Jody woke two of the girls, Quinn, finishing up college at Ohio University, and Vanessa, a high school senior, and everyone gathered in mom's bedroom. Tears flowed.



Mom always loved Christmastime.

So began the holiday season nine years ago.

Some who read this may think that Christmas has become a sad holiday for me, but that's far from the case.

I spent the rest of November and much of December in Beverly with my sister and her family. In the week before Christmas Jody, Quinn and Vanessa were at a Marietta shopping center when my sister showed her girls small wrapped presents.

"They're from your grandmother," Jody said. "Their gifts she chose from her Avon catalog."

Everyone cried.

The gifts were pretty remarkable when you think of the implications. With death near mom hadn't withdrawn from this mortal world, but had wanted her grandchildren to get presents from her just as they had since they were toddlers. She said Merry Christmas from Heaven.

Her gifts seemingly from Heaven saved Christmas for me.

Such love creates wonderful Christmastime memories.

My memories of Christmases past would not exist without her efforts to make sure my sister and I always woke up on Christmas Day with nice presents under the tree -- even in tight financial times.

In my toddler days, dad and her took me to downtown Akron to see the wonderful animated window displays in O'Neil's, Polsky's and other department stores.

Later, when we lived in Rialto, California, Christmas shopping always included a trip up the escalators of J.C. Penney, Sears and the Harris Company to their special toy departments. I loved seeing the elaborate model train displays with their Christmas villages and snow-covered countryside.

The Christmas season in Rialto also included an evening trip through the neighborhood famous for its houses decked out with thousands of Christmas lights and front yards populated by animated Santas, elves, grinches, toy soldiers, carolers, snowmen, candy canes and manger scenes.

As an adult, I looked forward to my annual trip north just before Christmas where I would join mom Christmas shopping. We'd always shop in nearby Parkersburg and then head north to Akron where we'd visit Grandma Mid in Rittman and do a bit of shopping at the Akron/Canton malls.

I especially remember December 1994 up in Canton. Christmas music was playing in J.C. Penney and Cleveland Browns memorabilia challenged holiday decorations for dominance. The Browns were in the playoffs that year and it was exciting to see fandom going bonkers over the Browns' playoff appearance. We bought a Browns ornament for the Christmas tree.

The years march on, and as the old hymn says, "Precious memories, unseen angels from somewhere to my soul, how they linger ever near me, and the sacred scenes unfold."