The Betas take the field in 'The Fracking War'

WATKINS GLEN, New York, USA - Eight months and 95,000 words later, The Fracking War (at least Ver. 1.0) is done.

Spiral-bound copies of the manuscript were dispatched today via U.S. mail to two beta readers, one in California, the other in Maine.  The third beta reader is my in-house editor (and wife!) who each week checks over my column for the Finger Lakes Times carefully before I send it in.

All three beta readers have been tasked with the same thing: Please read this as you would any novel and see if it works.

The  idea for writing this book came from reading several very well-done, non-fiction tomes critical of hydrofracking for natural gas. They were full of details, numbers, references to studies. There were references to lots of news reports. Lots of references. Lots of news reports.

In some chapters, the books showed flashes of the emotion and trauma that surrounds this technology - a technology so lovingly embraced by our incumbent U.S. President and fossil-fuel companies who are making a bundle of cash.

And pretty much destroying the environment in the process.

Unfortunately, I don't believe those books have been able to capture the imagination of the public. They report and recite. In The Fracking War, I want to report and ignite - as in ignite passion.

My three beta readers will let me know in the next few weeks if I did that.

If I did. Well, Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War!

Columns come from reading, thinking, and, well, more reading

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Every Friday, right after I read my column in the Finger Lakes Times (Geneva, NY), I experience a sense of satisfaction for a few hours, while I glow over the words that my editor Mike Cutillo chose to print.

Then I start to sweat: What the hell will I write about for next week?

It's not that there is a lack of topics, of course. There's an entire world for me to write about. But exactly what? And for me, exactly how?

My aim is not to write a news column. It would be easy to grab a screaming headline, do a 600-word riff on whatever noodle-headed thing the federal, state, or local government is up to and call it a column. Slam bam. Good God,  newspapers and the internet are full of items that push my blood pressure into the stratosphere.

But I want to offer something a little more on the upscale side of column writing, something that I had to chew on for awhile before I put it up. Something that has not only research, substance, but a definite element that is uniquely mine.

Last week, I wrote about how a Taylor Swift concert affected me - and my sense of time passing. It's already drawn some good comments. I could have written about the glitter of her concert or her music. But that doesn't add anything to the conversation.

So this week what's up to write about? Well, the column is still very much in the thinking-researchr-reading stage. My tornado outline is a mess and barely readable with scribblings all over a page, in the margins and now on the backside of my legal notepad, too.

I read a half-dozen pieces about my possible theme by noon, though even that shifts the focus from article to article.

But the idea is forming like a hurricane in the south Atlantic. And with luck it will hit me squarely by Tuesday a.m. when I have to start the first draft to make my deadline.