Sweet Sunshine, Spectacular Snow

On the passes coming into Tahoe are 15-foot snow walls.

The mountains are plastered with white.

It doesn't get better for wintertime play.

Grab your boards and c'mon up the mountain!

Heavenly as seen from Meyers

Snow Beats iPhone For Kids And Families

Most people think of Tahoe winter as a place of world-famous ski resorts.

But when you drive up Highway 50, you see hundreds of people stopped along the way. They park on the shoulder and take their kids up the forested slopes. They find a place to have more fun than many or most skiers at the resorts. Look close, and you'll see that not one kid is on their phone!

What a great way to show kids that there is more to life than social media!

Library = Church

For writers, walking into a library is like walking into church. The stuff inside the building is sacred, and the stuff one carries out is all about wisdom and guidance and thought provocation and a connection to something more important than our prosaic lives.

I've given talks at several dozen libraries in Northern California and Northern Nevada. I gave two more this last week, Colusa, CA and Lincoln, CA. Those libraries reinforced once again the simple fact that a library is the cultural center of its community. And the people who frequent libraries are remarkable, highly educated, and intensely interested in the larger world of ideas. Just to have a dozen or a hundred people turn off the TV and go to their local library for an event speaks volumes about their priorities. (And, of course, when people come to hear an author speak it is hugely gratifying to that author!)

If you haven't visited your local library in awhile, plan to go soon. You may be surprised. Even in a world where you can get lots of information from Google, your library offers uncountable resources.

My hat is off to libraries. A writer's church.

13 Feet Of Snow In One Storm??!!!

As I write this, we are getting a really serious storm.  No surprise there. We often get really serious storms. But when I checked the National Weather Service forecast, I saw verbiage I've never seen before.
"Localized amounts up to 13 feet."
Yikes, Yowser, and Holy Cow.

The next paragraphs are from the NWS website:
"...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 4 PM PST TUESDAY... Heavy snow occurring. Travel will be very difficult to impossible, especially today and Monday. Tree branches could fall as well. Total snow accumulations of 5 to 10 feet expected, with localized amounts up to 13 feet. Winds gusting as high as 50 mph Sunday afternoon into Monday with gusts to 100 mph over ridges. A period of blizzard conditions is possible Sunday night into Tuesday morning."

You pretty much won't see forecasts like that anywhere else. I guess Y'all better plan your ski trips to Tahoe.

5000 Reviews On Amazon

Dear Reader,

As I'm finishing up #17 in the series (to be published this coming summer), I'm very pleased to see that my books on Amazon are crossing a significant milestone: 5000 reviews. At an average of 4.6 stars.

Thanks so very much to all of you for your support and interest. Authors can write books and sometimes feel like they go out into a black hole and no one notices.

I've been so fortunate that you readers have taken such an interest in my fictional world.

Thanks again, more than I can say.

Todd

Watch Where You Park Your Jet!

I hate it when my jet has too much snow on its wings! It slides down the wings toward the rear, which tips the plane teeter-totter-style, and lifts the lighter front end up in the air.

A Cessna Citation Jet at the Truckee Airport

Thanks to the Sierra Sun for the story.

Whole Foods Is Nearly Finished

The new Whole Foods store in South Lake Tahoe is nearly finished. We don't have an official opening date yet, however they are estimating being open for business this summer.

Whole Foods taking shape.
It is on Lake Tahoe Blvd, just west of Ski Run Blvd.

Tahoe's Mountains From The West Slope - Nice!

A few days ago, we were hiking on the West Slope, below the snow line. We came to a place with a nice view across a reservoir to the Sierra Crest, the mountains directly to the west of Lake Tahoe. These include (on the right side of the picture) the Crystal Range, those "Desolation Wilderness" mountains that house Lake Aloha and a hundred other lakes. You can see these mountains from the East Shore and, if you're out on the water, from all over the lake.

While on a very clear day, you can see the the Sierra Crest from the coastal pass just east of Vallejo in the Bay Area, seeing these mountains from the west is not so easy and common as seeing them from Lake Tahoe. But they are still beautiful! After today's storm, they will be even whiter.

How To Start A Book Club

A Reader wrote and asked how to start a book club. I thought there might well be other people who are wondering as well. So I'll paste in my response to her.

Thanks for asking about book clubs.

Although I've visited around 100 book clubs over the years, I'm not much of an expert in how to form one. What I can say is that most book clubs meet once a month. Some are very informal, where the books are mainly a reason for a social event (but what a good reason!).

Some are more formal, with organized discussion of a book. The most common approach is that each month one of the members will pick a book to be read and discussed the following month. Sometimes that person will pick a few titles and people vote on their preference. Each month, the member who chooses the book rotates.

Then everyone reads the chosen book and prepares to talk about it at the next meeting. Once in awhile - if the book is by an author who isn't too far away - the author of the book is invited.

Of course, there is always food and usually wine. Sometimes, it's potluck at a local clubhouse. Some clubs meet at restaurants.  Other clubs will rotate houses and the host provides food.

The average book club is about 8-12 people. A few are more than that, although more people makes things less organized, louder, and less suited to discussion. I've been to some clubs with only 5 or 6 members. Once in awhile several book clubs will get together at the same time to host an author at a larger venue.

Organizing a book club is as simple as inviting people to join. Often but not always, there will be some kind of general focus to the club, like mysteries or romances or literary or "anything goes." I've been to one club that chose from all genres except romances. (I suppose that was because romances are the most popular genre and the club wanted to expose readers to other genres.)

One of the obvious attractions is that in book clubs people will meet other people who are highly intelligent, educated, and interested in an intellectual world. I've been to clubs where people became best friends with each other. I've been to clubs that have been meeting continuously for over twenty years. 

Another attraction of book clubs is that they generally don't have hierarchy and officers and minutes and raffles and pledges and all the other stuff that service clubs have. Book clubs don't "come to order" and have motions etc. They are simply fun gatherings focused on books. (Please know that I very much appreciate what service clubs do. I'm just pointing out differences.)

I hope this helps.

Enjoy!

Todd

Tahoe Skydrop Will Be Free On Kindle For Christmas

Happy Holidays

As in years past, I'm making my latest title, Tahoe Skydrop, free on Kindle for five days beginning on Christmas.

This free promotion runs from December 25th through Dec 29th.

There's no catch. My thanks to all of you for keeping the art of reading alive (and helping authors pay their mortgages!).

Click on the book or title below for the link to the Amazon page.

Tahoe Skydrop, #16 in the Owen McKenna Tahoe mystery series.

Have a great holiday... Reading!

Tom Cruise In South Lake Tahoe

A whole lotta movies have had scenes shot in Tahoe. Long-time locals are used to seeing movie stars.

Add Tom Cruise to the list.

Cruise is finally shooting a sequel to Top Gun called Top Gun: Maverick. For that, he reportedly is doing his gig at South Shore locations including Washoe Meadows State Park, a little known park with no real access, a hideaway that South Shore locals enjoy and don't generally tell tourists about. Thus, perfect for Cruise to get some private space to film action sequences in the mountain forest. Additional reports say that military helicopters have been involved and are using the South Lake Tahoe airport as a base.

Watch for the film in June of 2020.

Robot Cars In Ski Country?

Some of you may have seen the news stories on Google's Waymo self-driving car division and the other AI (Artificial Intelligence) cars. One story in particular really brought home how amazing these cars are, and also how they still have a way to go.

A Tesla. Nice electric car that drives itself?

Cops noticed a man behind the wheel who appeared to be asleep. He was in a self-driving car, which I think was a Tesla. They tried to pull it over, but the car wouldn't stop. (Oops, the software designers hadn't yet made the car able to recognize when the cops were pulling it over.) It took several miles for four cop cars to surround the car on all sides, trapping it and forcing it to slow to a stop. At that point, they discovered that the driver was indeed asleep, drunk at the wheel, taking a nap.

The incident shows just how far self-driving cars have come.

Then came a story about Waymo, a self-driving taxi. Kind of like Uber and Lyft. Except Waymo's program has no human drivers.  It is apparently going to launch soon.

A Waymo self-driving taxi.

Like most people, I'll have to witness it to become convinced. Especially in snow country. But how nice would it be - when you are eating out and you want to have a glass of wine or two but not drive to or from in the snowstorm - and along comes a robot car with all-wheel-drive. How cool would that be?

Anyway, Wall Street analysts think that Waymo could be doing 100 billion dollars a year in business in just a few years. Whoa.  Google already controls much of the internet and our knowledge world. Soon they'll control much of what goes on along the highways.

Things have changed...