Rules Of Writing

 It pays for writers to periodically revisit the basics. One of the writing gods we worship is Elmore Leonard (1925 - 2013), author of classic novels, many of which were turned into films: Hombre with Paul Newman, Valdez is Coming with Burt Lancaster, 3:10 to Yuma with Glenn Ford, Joe Kidd with Clint Eastwood, Get Shorty with John Travolta and Gene Hackman, Out Of Sight with Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, and two dozen others!

Leonard is widely thought of as a master of dialogue.

Every serious writer has a copy of Leonard's Rules for writing. If you are a writer and don't have it, print this out and tape it above your desk.

1 Never open a book with weather.

2 Avoid prologues. (Yes, I'm guilty!)

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry the dialogue.

4 Never use an adverb to modify "said."

5 Keep your exclamation points under control.

6 Never use the words Suddenly or All hell broke loose.

7 Use regional dialect sparingly.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10 Try to leave out the parts that readers skip. 

11 If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

Incredible Avalanche 40 Years Ago At Alpine Meadows And The Amazing Dog Who Saved A Woman's Life

This post is in memory of the first avalanche dog in the U.S. to save a buried person. Roberta Huber's German Shepherd Bridget found and saved 22-year-old Anna Conrad's life 40 years ago.

The recent Sierra storms have prompted thoughts about late season storms. We're so grateful for the precipitation of the last few days. While significant, it's nothing compared to what can happen.

In 1982, it started snowing at the end of March. While accounts of snow totals varied, most agree that somewhere around 11 or more feet of snow fell in four days. Despite constant avalanche control efforts throughout the duration of the storm, a massive slab avalanche swept down Alpine Meadows on March 31st. (Just northwest of Lake Tahoe.) 

The slide snapped off massive old-growth trees, took out chairlifts, crushed the three-story base lodge, and buried the parking lot 15 feet deep. The resort had been closed due to the storm and avalanche danger, and most of the people had left. But seven of those who hadn't yet gotten out were killed. One more, Anna Conrad, was nearly killed. She was buried for five days.

Many people searched for days. Five days after the slide, Huber's dog Bridget was searching when she picked up Anna's scent. The dog was excited and nervous with barely controllable energy. The dog knew what she had found: A live human.

Search workers followed Bridget's lead and dug out Anna. The young woman had eaten no food for five days and had only snow for water. The cold had taken its toll, and the woman lost one leg and the toes on the other from frostbite. But she survived thanks to Bridget.

When we first moved to Tahoe in 1990, there were very few trained avalanche rescue dogs. Now all the resorts have full-time avalanche rescue dogs on staff. Goldens, Labs, and others. They have saved multiple lives.

Moral of the story? Never underestimate what the weather (and a dog) can do.

Best Community College In California?

 A company called Niche dot com studies education opportunities across the country. Are they the best there is at this sort of activity? Maybe. Maybe not. Do their rankings matter much? Maybe. Maybe not. But let's just say we wanted to find a good community college for our kid. We might check Niche. 

If so, we'd see that Lake Tahoe Community College is rated #1 in California. And, for a time, #13 in the entire country.

Really? Not some college near Stanford or Caltech? Not some ocean idyll on the Central Coast or next to San Diego? 

Lake Tahoe Community College.

LTCC ( https://ltcc.edu ) is worth checking out. On Tahoe's South Shore in the middle of the town of South Lake Tahoe, LTCC has great facilities a great faculty and is close to everything a kid might love. (Maybe too close.) Boating, skiing, snowboarding, hiking.

Full disclosure: The above photo isn't on the LTCC campus. However it is only a mile away.

As with Sierra Nevada College on the North Shore, we are proud of our educational facilities in Tahoe. Come join us.

Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care - Saving Animals For 40 Years

 Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care https://ltwc.org/ has saved more animals (tens of thousands) than you can count. Bears and eagles and owls and porcupines and racoons and coyotes. The list is suprisingly long. If an animal is injured or orphaned, LTWC will capture it, nurse it back to health, and, hopefully, release it back into the wild.

Here's a recent story about a bobcat that they are nursing back to health.

https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/tahoe-wildlife-care-gives-injured-bobcat-2nd-chance/

We are very lucky to have such a dedicated group focused on the health and well being of our wildlife.

Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care is supported by donations. Please visit their website to learn more and find out how you can help: https://ltwc.org/

Does Crime Fiction Require Violence?

In most crime fiction, there is a kind of balance between the violence of the crime and the violence of the resolution.

Some crime fiction has genteel characters, plots that are mostly puzzles, solutions that are arrived at with dialogue, not guns. Any violence mostly takes place "off stage." Think Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Or Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. The crimes can often be violent - murder, for example - but we don't witness the violence. We just see the aftermath. The solution is more a mental exercise than a physical one.

On the other end of the spectrum are stories like Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. The violence simmers throughout, serious, nasty violence that often boils over. The resolution of the Reacher stories is mostly violent. Reacher rights the wrongs of the bad guys by bringing serious violence to them, breaking bones and often killing them as well. The body count can get very high. Sometimes I think Child took as a model Shakespeare's tragedies, where nearly everyone dies at the end, onstage.

Regardless of the writer's approach, many people read crime fiction because it usually provides justice at the end. This is unlike the real world, where justice is often absent or unsatisfying in some basic way.

A writer doesn't need to have violence to tell a good story. But a writer does need a balance between the violence perpetrated by the bad guys and the violence enacted by the hero during the resolution. If the crime is presented as a puzzle, then we expect the solution to be largely mental, a thought process that solves the puzzle and delivers the bad guy to the legal system. Those stories may have little or no violence. 

If, instead, like Shakespeare, the violence takes place before our eyes, we come to expect that the resolution of the story will have violence. To be satisfying, those components need some balance.

Violence within the story should at least be partly balanced by the violence resolving the story.

We recently rented a multi-episode show on Netflix that was well-written, smart, had interesting characters, and a good backstory. (I won't say the name of the show for the same reason I don't write one-star reviews. Nothing is gained by it.)

But it was unsatisfying because this violence equation was off. The show depicted horrific crimes involving the trafficking and selling of young women. There was also murder and torture. It wasn't a blood bath, and the worst of the crimes took place offstage. In this regard it was like so many crime shows. Not a gorefest, but a realistic depiction of crimes that happen every day.

As the show went on, we "knew" that the resolution would have a kind of emotional payback. Not only would the bad guy get caught, but there would be at least some violence directed at that bad guy. Like most viewers, we didn't want the bad guy to be tortured for his crimes. But we wanted to see him make a run for it, and in the process see him experience at least some kind of pain or physical injury, a taste of what he's done to his victims.

Unfortunately, after 90 minutes of watching the good guy trying to catch the horrific criminal, the resolution was seeing them put handcuffs on the bad guy. Nothing more. The bad guy who'd caused so much terrible suffering suffered nothing. 

This left us feeling disappointed and even a little cheated. The writer/director apparently thought that despite a story about violent crime, having no violence happen to the bad guy at the end would satisfy sophisticated viewers who are "above" prosaic shows that depict violence. The show was probably realistic. But unsatisfying. And it's my guess that this approach is why this otherwise smart show was canceled after two seasons.

We writers need to remember the lessons of Shakespeare. If you want to satisfy readers and viewers, you need to give them at least a little bit of payback and bring some bring pain to the bad guy who caused so much pain.

The scales of justice in the world of fiction need to have more balance than those in the real world.

More Animals (Birds) That Reveal We Humans Aren't So Special

 The way we humans think we're so special would be funny if it weren't so sad. Less than 100 years ago, people still thought we were the only creatures with culture. We thought animals were not only dumb, they had no complexity to their society. They certainly didn't teach each other complex tasks. They didn't make and use tools. And they didn't carry on cultural traditions. They didn't mourn their dead. They didn't invent new behaviors and then teach those behavior to others. They didn't make plans and then carry them out. They didn't have self-awareness. And they didn't recognize themselves in mirrors.

Now we've learned that many animals do all of these things and more. Whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, elephants, dogs, pigs, and birds such as parrots, pigeons, and crows.

New research shows just how dramatic and impressive animal intelligence is.

Dolphins are bilingual. They speak a language specific to their own species when they are around their own kind, and they switch to a more generic language when they encounter other dolphin species. They cooperate with whales to help each other hunt fish.

After chimpanzees watched humans using sign language, they began to develop it themselves and then taught it to their young. 

Orangutans can use a hammer and nails, and - if it suits their needs - hide items from people. One stole a key from a zookeeper and nonchalantly hid it in his mouth when the man came looking for it.

Elephants are so socially sophisticated and empathetic, they will sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. 

Parrots can learn hundreds of words and their meanings. Pigeons can recognize different people and can learn the difference between impressionist paintings and abstract expressionist paintings. Crows can invent tools to suit their needs and memorize the routes of garbage trucks so they can be in the best places when the trucks come by with potential food. Crows also have complex death rituals when one of their group dies.

Now, magpies have shown altruistic behavior, helping each other to remove tracking devices that humans put on them.  There is no advantage to a magpie to help others like this. It is a cultural characteristic much more complicated than doing something that merely helps find food or a mate.

You can read about it here:

https://theconversation.com/altruism-in-birds-magpies-have-outwitted-scientists-by-helping-each-other-remove-tracking-devices-175246

And when one cockatoo learned to open a wheeled garbage container in Australia, it taught the technique to others. Now, cockatoos all over have learned the trick:

https://theconversation.com/clever-cockatoos-in-southern-sydney-have-learned-to-open-kerb-side-bins-and-it-has-global-significance-164794

Tahoe Moon (Owen McKenna Mystery #20))

 The 20th Owen McKenna is in the pipeline and due out August 1st! Yay! Who woulda thought when the first book, Tahoe Deathfall, came out 21 years ago, that I'd make it to #20. Was it dumb luck? Or dogged persistence? No. It was you readers supporting and cheering me on for two decades. Thank you so much!

In Tahoe Moon, Detective Owen McKenna finds a lost girl, 8-year-old Camille Dexter. She's waiting at a hotel near Northstar Resort for her grandfather, Grandpa Charlie, to come and pick her up. McKenna tries to talk to her but finds out she's deaf. McKenna and his friend Sergeant Santiago learn that her grandfather has died, crushed by a tree that he apparently felled as a job earning money as a tree cutter.

As McKenna pursues figuring out what to do with Camille, he runs into the meanest, sickest bad guy he's ever met, a man who may be a hired killer. 

The action in Tahoe Moon is as intense as Camille Dexter is sweet. I think readers will grow to care very much about her life, her hopes, and her dreams. Deaf from birth, she's never heard spoken language. But she's learned to talk very well. She's a brilliant kid and is also learning Spanish and French in American Sign Language. Having lost her only family, her heartbreaking dilemma is countered by her determination and grit. 

I will be doing a bunch of events at book stores and libraries. And it will also be available on Kindle. Here is the Kindle Pre-order page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09V33F6KF/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p2_i7

Massive Boulder Smashes Hwy 50 An Hour After We Drove By

 File this in the category of Unexpected Risks. We all plan for some risks. And we know that there are risks you can't plan for. Like Earthquakes.

But risks often come from a direction we don't usually think about. In this case? Look up.

Late Thursday afternoon, we drove over Echo Summit. A short time later, a big chunk fell off of the cliff above. That single boulder was big enough to crush any vehicle. Fortunately, it appears no one was hurt.

Photo credit: CHP

Which Carnivore Is The Most Successful Hunter?

 We all know the basics of the food chain. Plants use sunlight, water, and soil to grow. Herbivores are the myriad animals that eat plants. And carnivores are the animals that eat other animals.

We focus a lot on the big, magnificent carnivores, from lions and tigers to grizzly bears to great white sharks to killer whales.

What doesn't get mentioned much, however, is that most of those carnivores don't have high rates of hunting success. When lions go after a meal, their success rate is reportedly as low as 10%. Same for many other carnivores, such as wolves. 

That might explain why carnivores regularly take the easy route and steal kills from other carnivores. Grizzly bears take food that wolves kill. Bald eagles steal fish that were caught by ospreys. Lions steal the kills of several animals, including those of the African wild dog, 50-pound predators that hunt in packs and live in the southern parts of Africa.

Wait a minute. 500-pound lions rely on prey that was taken down by 50-pound wild dogs?

Yup. It turns out that African Wild Dogs - a distant relative of domesticated dogs - are very intelligent and have a highly complex social structure. They do everything cooperatively, including coordinating their hunting activity. 

While wolves commonly hunt in packs of 4 to 6, African Wild Dogs hunt in packs of 20 or more. They have a sophisticated hunting strategy and they communicate among each other during the hunt. 

As a result, their hunting success rate is 80%, one of the highest success rates in the animal kingdom.

Enjoy the beauty and smarts of these animals, because it's estimated that they will be extinct in the not-too-distant future. Why? Because, like so many carnivores, they require lots of uninterrupted territory. And that territory is being fragmented by human development.

You can read more about these wild dogs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

People Who Feed Wildlife...

 A 500-pound black bear on Tahoe's South Shore has been sentenced to death because it has broken into numerous homes, including homes that had people in them.

Why has this bear become such a nuisance? Because it became habituated to human-supplied food. This can happen because the bear found dumpsters and garbage cans to raid. But it's also likely that humans simply fed it out of misguided notions.

All locals have heard stories of "the guy down the street" who puts out dog food for the bears. Maybe he wants to take photos of the bears up close. Or maybe, like one person we know, he just "loves seeing bears so much."

As a result, many homes and cabins have been damaged, and some have been destroyed by bears who are looking for food in the fridge.

All the love for bears comes from a good place, but it puts the Forest Service in a very bad place. They made the difficult decision to put the bear down to eliminate any further danger to people.

The attraction of wildlife stems largely from the fact that it is wild. Feed it, and it is no longer wild.

When your vacation home or car is ruined, thank the people who fed the bear and taught it that houses and cars are the best place to find food.

Let's learn to love wildlife in the wild. Take your camera on photo-hunting trips. Don't set it up on a tripod next to the dog food in your open garage.

New South Tahoe Event Center

 Locals have noticed a large building being built in Stateline (South Shore) near the Mont Bleu hotel.

It is being put together by the Douglas County Vistor Authority. (Douglas County is one of 5 Tahoe counties and is on the south, Nevada side of the Tahoe Basin and extends down to Carson Valley.) It's designed to be a place where businesses can book concerts, conventions, trade shows and such. (The main entertain venue will seat 6000 people) Construction completion is scheduled for the end of 2022. Bookings are said to begin in 2023. 

It promises to be a nice addition to the business community and will presumably employ many people. 

Where those workers will come from is another story, as we don't have nearly enough affordable housing. Probably, they will commute up to the basin from Carson Valley (Minden, Gardnerville, etc.)

Check out the design:

Here's the website link for more information:

https://tahoedouglasva.org/events-center/

18 Tahoe Truckee Reno Athletes At Beijing Olympics!

 We have a surfeit of Olympic athletes from our area. 

Tahoe-area thletes who are currently competing at the Winter Olympics in China are:

David Wise

Luke Winters

Brita Sigourney

JC Schoonmaker

Alice Robinson

Katie Parker

Nina O'Brien

Louis Muhlen-Schulte

Michel Macedo

Maureen "Mo" Lebel

Cody Laplante

AJ Hurt

Hannah Halvorsen

Eileen Gu

Travis Ganong

Keely Cashman

Bryce Bennett

Jamie Anderson

Congrats to these great athletes!