It’s taken me a long, long time to finally get around to cleaning this book up and putting it out there, but Memory’s Edge is finally up for pre-order and will release on Kindle and #KindleUnlimited on August 21st!
Can’t wait to share this one with all my readers!!
https://blab.im/ts-krupa-authorchat-with-delsheree-gladden” target=”_blank”>TS Krupa, author of “The Ten Year Reunion,” invited me to chat on a new-ish platform called Blab. The neat thing about this is that you get audio and video, split-screen, as you watch the chat session. It was so much fun!
The replay of the chat is stored on the site and available to watch at any time!
https://blab.im/ts-krupa-authorchat-with-delsheree-gladden
Now that my kids are getting older, children’s museums offer less and less. Their interest in playing with bubbles or making paperclip helicopters has waned. At almost-ten and thirteen, they want something in between appreciating modern art and crawling through the “pretend you’re a bug” exhibit. They want exciting, yet interesting.
During a recent trip to Chicago, we spent some time exploring Shedd Aquarium, and it was one of my kids’ favorite places. There is a little bit of everything at Shedd Aquarium, which makes it work for a wide variety of ages. The exhibits focus on learning, as well as fun and interaction.
During the summer and early fall, you can visit the outdoor Stingray Touch pool to pet stingrays. The pool contains a good number of stingrays, so everyone has a chance to get up close. After the volunteer explains how to safety touch the stingrays, you’re free to enjoy the experience for as long as you like. My youngest loved this, and also spent time at the indoor touch pool filled with several large species of fish, and the starfish touch pool on the lower level.
After my daughter petted fish to her heart’s content, we went in to check out the 4-D experience. They had a choice of SpongeBob, Coastal Predators, and Prehistoric Sea Monsters. We bypassed SpongeBob and went with the Coastal Predators movie. While we did get jabbed in the back as one of the special effects, the movie itself was entertaining and educational. Paired with the 3-D visuals, water mists, and wind effects, both myself and the kids enjoyed the show.
Special experiences done, we moved on to the rest of the aquarium. The amphibian exhibit was listed as a “special exhibit,” but most of the visitors seemed to have tickets which gave access to it, so no one was watching the entrance. For this being a special exhibit, it didn’t seem any better or more exciting than the regular exhibits. Having said that, all the regular exhibits were well put together and interesting, so this one certainly wasn’t disappointing. I had expected something more “special” than an exhibit of frogs, newts, and salamanders I had seen at other zoos or aquariums, though.
The regular exhibits held a variety of fun and interesting options. The main floor exhibit “Waters of the World”, was divided into corridors which held fish from specific regions. If you were interested in something particular, it was easy to find what you wanted. Centered between these corridors was the Amazon Rising exhibit, a coral reef habitat where you could watch divers feed and interact with the fish at scheduled times throughout the day. In the basement, the “Wild Reef,” is home to a large number of sharks, coral, and tropical fish. You get to view the 400,000 gallon tank from a huge viewing window that makes you feel like you’re in the water with them.
The “Polar Play Zone” was partially closed when we visited, due to the upper level viewing deck being closed off to allow the recently born baby dolphin and its mother time to bond. However, at the lower level viewing area, you could see both the dolphins and several beluga whales. The last, largest exhibit was “At Home on the Great Lakes,” which featured environments and fish from the area, while teaching visitors about the local ecosystem. This was a full scale experience you walked through, stopping to observe each habitat as you experienced the simulated Great Lakes area.
If you’re interested in visiting Shedd Aquarium, it is part of Museum Campus in Downtown Chicago. It’s within walking distance of many Michigan Avenue hotels. If you’re staying further away, there are CTA bus and trains stops nearby for easy access, and has paid parking available as well. If you want to make a day of museums, it’s also right next door to both the Adler Planetarium and Field Museum.
Ticket prices for the “Total Experience” package range from $40-$55 for adults and $29-$46 for kids ($2 discount for ordering online). This includes access to the regular exhibits, special amphibians exhibit, 4-D movie, and the Stingray touch pool (open seasonally). There are tickets available to only access the regular exhibits in the $20-25 range, as well. If you’re planning to visit multiple top attractions in Chicago, you can get a Chicago CityPASS (tickets for 3-5 local attractions) for $98 and $82 for adults and kids, respectively, which saves you up to 50% when you use all the tickets.
If you end up at the aquarium for the whole day, which is definitely possible, they have several dining options onsite. The café on the main floor is a sit-down style restaurant. It’s a more expensive option, and the formal set up appeals to adults more than kids, but anyone is welcome. There’s also a small deli right next to the café, as well as cafeteria-style food options on the lower level.
The aquarium is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5/6 p.m. (depending on the season). If you’re planning to do two attractions in one day, get there first thing in the morning, as crowds pick up considerably in the afternoon. When we arrived a little after 9 a.m., we walked right in, but when we came out of the building around 1 p.m., there was a line all the way down the steps and into the courtyard. Plan your second activity for the afternoon to avoid being stuck in a line.
While Shedd Aquarium is one of the pricier downtown Chicago attractions, its large number of exhibits and wide variety of activities makes it appealing to most ages and well worth the price.
If you’re planning at trip to Mesa Verde National Park and hoping to explore the Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling, one of the largest and most popular cliff dwelling sites at the park, you’ll be limited to viewing it from a distance. Why? While we want all our visitors to experience the cliff dwellings, keeping guests safe is our top priority. Recent rock falls at the Spruce Tree House site prompted the decision to close it to the public for the first time in 50 years.
Because the alcoves containing the cliff dwellings were formed by natural processes that are still at work, dwelling sites undergo change over time. Due to erosion, naturally forming cracks exist on the mesa above the Spruce Tree House, and continue to spread. One very large crack spans the entire length of the Spruce Tree House alcove, and has been the source of rock falls before.
In 1940, cracks and instabilities were discovered, and actions were taken to slow the erosion process. Plants and debris wedged in the cracks that were making them wider were removed. To help protect the cliffs even more, a protective covering was built to waterproof the system of cracks and hold off additional erosion.
That covering worked for two decades, but in 1960, a 10-ton rock fell from the south end of the cliff overhang, hitting the nearby public trail and part of the Spruce Tree House site. Trained climbers pulled down a loose, five-ton rock in danger of falling to prevent it from doing more damage, and cleanup began. The previous covering put over the crack was removed and replaced with an anchoring system that would hopefully prevent the cracks from widening. These 42 anchors, up to 16 feet long, were drilled into the cliff face to anchor the arches in place, then the crack was filled with gravel and cement. This system held for many years, until recently.
In August of 2015, several small rock falls at the south end Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling caused new safety concerns. Hiking to the site was temporarily closed while park officials evaluated the danger of more rock falls. Unfortunately, their evaluation made it clear the site was too dangerous for visitors. In October of 2015, officials decided the site would remain closed to the public until the safety of the area could be studied in detail.
Wasting no time, the evaluation of the area began the following month, and was completed by a specially trained climbing team made up of members from several National Parks. During this project, the system of cracks above the arch was inspected, and a large amount of loose rocks and debris were removed. The cleanup revealed that the inner areas of the cracks were soft due to water leaching away minerals necessary for keeping the rocks strong, and further damage was possible. The risk of continued cracking and falling rocks made it impossible to reopen the site. A full geotechnical assessment will likely be conducted in the future but, for the time being, Spruce Tree House will remain closed to the public.
Even with the closure, this beautiful monument can still be enjoyed by park visitors from a distance. Overlooks near the Chapin Mesa Archaeological Museum provides views of the Spruce Tree House, and Rangers are available to answer any questions visitors may have.
While flying does cut down your travel time, it also leaves you without a car. That’s not so bad when visiting New Orleans and staying at a hotel right in the French Quarter…mostly. While my husband was sitting through an EPA conference, my two kids and I walked all over the French Quarter, seeing the aquarium, kids museum, cemeteries, the double decker tour buses, and the butterfly habitat.
No car? No problem.
Except when we wanted to visit the zoo. I love zoos, probably more than my kids, and NOLA was supposed to have a great zoo. It was definitely not within walking distance, though. My previous experience with the area was driving through the French Quarter on the way to Florida, appreciating the architecture from the confines of our weird smelling RV.
For some reason, rather than just having the nice man at the hotel call us a cab, I thought we could make it to the zoo using NOLA’s public transit system. I had several maps which laid out the route to the zoo through various modes of transportation. It would be an adventure, right?
With two kids (7 and 10), and my only other experience using mass transit being riding back and forth on the Metro from campus to Washington DC during a week-long high school trip for a National History Day competition, we set out.
So, we hopped on the tour bus and rode several miles to a historical neighborhood, where we bravely got off the bus and attempted to find our streetcar stop. We cautiously approached a bud shelter where several older African American women were sitting on the bench, and after failing to find some kind of indication of whether this was a stop for the streetcar, bus, or something else, I asked the ladies if we were in the right spot.
We weren’t.
They nicely pointed out where we should be standing. A platform in the middle of the road. The streetcar lines literally ran down the middle of the street, with cars driving on either side. Beginning to regret this adventure, we trekked safely to the streetcar stop, only to be followed by yelling. I looked around, hoping the shrieking isn’t directed at us, and found the nice lady who’d directed us yelling and waving at us. I was so startled, it took me a few minutes to figure out what she was trying to tell me.
We were at the wrong streetcar stop.
Because the streetcars run on rails, they run in one direction. What direction you want to go determines was side of the tracks you should wait on. We were on the wrong side. So, grabbing my kids’ hands again, we hurried across the rails to the other side of the middle of the street, and waited at the right stop.
The streetcar came trundling up the tracks soon after, and we climbed aboard. My kids still thought we were having an adventure while I was cursing myself. I paid our fair and shuffled the kids into the car to find it packed. I held my kids’ hand, keeping them close, while I stood trying not to rub up against a guy whose armpit was dangerously close to my face and a lady whose shopping bags were taking up the aisle. After one more on and off to change streetcars, I eagerly dragged the kids off the streetcar when we reached our stop.
A sign for the zoo awaited us after walking a few blocks from the bus stop, but the zoo itself was nowhere in sight. There was, however, a group of tourists waiting around the sign who told me the zoo was still a mile away, but there was a shuttle coming! In twenty minutes. When the shuttle finally pulled up, its capacity was a whopping nine seats for the nearly twenty people waiting.
Seeing that I had two kids with me, the other tourists were extremely kind and let us get on with the first group. Ten minutes later, we finally made it to the zoo, and it was as fabulous as I’d been told. One of the best zoos I’ve visited. The only thing that wasn’t awesome was the fact that we had still had to get back to the hotel.
Originally, I intended to get my bachelor’s degree in English, but there were some issues with that plan and now I’m working on a degree in Communication-Media Studies with a minor in English. Getting my degree will allow me to teach more classes at our local community college, so here I go!
This summer I’m taking a Technical Writing class that is way more intense than I was expecting, and a Travel Writing class which is awesome.
Why am I sharing this?
Both classes understandably have homework, and since it’s writing related and I like sharing things I learn about writing with my readers, I’ll be posting some of my homework pieces here on my blog. Some for feedback, some for fun. So when you see posts about how to sew a French seam or why the Spruce Tree House is closed at Mesa Verde National Park, that’s why.
If you feel prompted to offer feedback, please do! There’s always room to learn more, and comments from readers are just as valuable to me as comments from classmates and instructors.
Honestly, that’s a really hard thing to give advice on, because every writer is different.
I’m going to attempt it anyway!
You’re not the only one who makes mistakes. We all do. While I was on a panel at Denver Comic Con last year, we were all asked what was the biggest mistake we ever made in a book. Jim Butcher was on that panel as well (which was seriously the highlight of that entire weekend!) and he said when writing the early Dresden Files books, he didn’t have the income to visit Chicago, where the books are set, and wrote a scene with characters meeting in the parking lot of the baseball stadium. Problem was, that stadium was built before the majority of people had cars. Hence: it has no parking lot.
If you need more examples…check out THIS LIST of the best/worst plot holes in movies. You could literally spend all day watching or reading similar lists.
Perfection is unattainable. In life, and in writing. No matter how many times you read your article, book, or story, there will be something you want to change, tweak, fix, whatever. It will never be done. At some point, you simply have to be DONE. Do your best, and then put it forward. I know authors who refuse to ever read their own books again once they’re published. If they do, they’ll want to go back and change it.
This can be a good thing when working through plot holes or character inconsistencies. When it comes to nitpicking your own writing, you will drive yourself crazy before you’re satisfied. Writers are often too close to their own work by the time they get to that final stage of editing. One word or comma likely won’t make the different between success and failure.
If you put out an article or book and it gets ZERO view or buys, is that the end? No, it’s a hurdle you just jumped over. Whether you breakout from day one or have to slog through mediocrity to achieve something better (like the majority of us) you’re on your way. That typo in your first paid blogpost, or character you forgot existed and was never heard from again, are a right of passage. We’ve all done it, and laugh about it later.
That left me wondering, are they classifying NA as adult? Bumping it down to YA? Ignoring it completely?
So, when I have questions like this, I post them on Facebook to see what other writer friends know or have experienced. I was surprised by the responses.
Most every comment I got said agents and publishers consider NA unsellable and don’t want to bother with it. This was from writers who tried to query NA and a few agents or people who worked for literary agencies.
Honestly, I was a little stumped by this. Why? Because readers are certainly buying NA. Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster and Walking Disaster were both NA, and both HUGE successes. NYT Bestselling successes. Let’s also consider Jennifer L. Armentrout (Wait for You), Cora Carmack (Losing It), and Colleen Hoover (Slammed), all of which have been wonderfully successful writing NA.
So, if readers are buying, why aren’t agents and publishers?
I’m sure if NA is looked at as a fad that will pass sooner rather than later, or if the high number of successful self-published authors in the genre make agents and publishers want to pass on competing, or what the exact reason is. If anyone has thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments! I’d love to hear them.
This is why my hubby and I couldn’t watch that TV show Numb3rs together. Or that lousy movie with Jenna Fischer as a dental hygienist.
Sometimes, reading is like this for me. It’s not always easy to turn off the writer part of my brain and just read to enjoy. All my writing pet peeves poke at me while I read, and make the experience less fun. Then I have to remind myself that some other writer is reading my books having the same thoughts!
So, instead of critiquing as I read, I try to learn from it instead. I just finished reading “Beautiful Burn” by Jamie McGuire and loved all the work she put into researching how the Hotshot firefighting teams in Colorado live and work. Having lived near or in Colorado for most of my life, I appreciated the level of detail she put into her writing, and it pushed me to dig a little deeper into some of the research I’ve been working on for “Wicked Revenge.”
I’ve also been reading JM Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (the original book) which, let me tell you, is far removed from the Disney version, or any other version I’ve ever seen. It’s bizarre and really not something a kid would understand or probably be interested by. I have a pretty good vocabulary and love British fiction, but I’m still looking up words and trying to figure out what Barrie is trying to get at half the time.
BUT, I love the honesty of his characters. Peter has this moment of intense jealousy as Wendy decides to go home to her mother and the Lost Boys say they’ll go with her because they want a mother too, and Peter mentions a saying in The Neverland that every time you breathe, a grownup dies, so he starts breathing really hard and fast. It’s dark, but completely honest for a young boy who’s losing his only family and is too proud to admit he wants them to stay. I want to be able to write that sort of frank honesty in my characters, even if I’ll leave the archaic words and style to Barrie.
Maybe this only happens in my house, but unlike the picture above with nicely closed cabinet doors, I can walk into a room and, no kidding, there is almost always at least one drawer, cupboard door, or package of something or other left open. Usually, more than one. There have been times when I’ve walked into the kitchen and literally every cupboard door is standing open because someone was looking for something and, after finding it, walked away.Your readers are like one of my kids looking for the bag of chocolate chips they want to add to their spoon of peanut butter. They keep looking for the answers you’ve promised them, scouring every page, rereading when they think they might have missed something, or silently working out all possible endings when they’re forced to put down a book and pay attention to real life for a few hours.
Those times when all the cupboard doors are left open because they have to search that hard, it often results from one of two things:
1: They’ve opened every other door in the kitchen and are reaching for the last one, opening it slowly, only to find, the cupboard is bare and the answers you promised aren’t actually in the kitchen, or anywhere…and they walk away, annoyed and vowing to never read anything of yours again because, dang it, when you want a snack and can only find celery sticks that make your mouth itch, your definitely not going to take the time to clean up your mess.
2: They reach for that last cupboard door, pull it open and – because you’ve done an impeccable job of filling in holes and stretching out your reveals – all those awesome answers come flooding out at the very end for your reader to gobble up as hungrily as my kids might those cookies I tried to hide from them, and abandon the kitchen in complete satisfaction…forgetting to close all the cupboard doors.
Just like when my kids (my daughter specifically) stomps away, annoyed I haven’t purchased sufficient snack-worthy foods, your readers will walk away when they finish a book unsatisfied because of questions you never answered if your book leaves them with option #1.
I’ve been teaching a self-editing class this semester, and one of the best tips for avoiding plot holes is to re-outline your novel or story as you do your first major edit.
Editing sucks, right? 90% of writers will agree with me on that, I’m pretty sure.
Outlines suck even more. Okay, maybe only other pansters will agree with me on that, but that’s got to be at least 50%, right?
You know what sucks more, though? Having a reader leave a nasty review…one that’s legit and calls you out on shortcuts you took or hints you failed to live up to.
During your first major outline, take the time to outline your book, taking note of all the hints you added in, the questions you posed, and the bits of backstory you teased your readers with.
If not, you have two choices:
1: Nix it. If you never followed up because that particular tidbit simply didn’t pan out, remove it.
2: Fill in where you neglected to follow through. Any questions you posed that pertain to that particular book (notice I’m not talking series-length questions) make sure you have an answer, or make it apparent that question will be answered in a subsequent book, if you’re working on a series.
Most readers have a Love/Hate relationship with valid cliffhangers.
ALL readers have a Hate/Hate relationship with lazy writing that leaves them questioning why they purchased a book.
USA Today Bestselling Author DelSheree Spinner 