Book Review: The Dragon’s Promise by Elizabeth Lim

The Dragon's Promise by Elizabeth Lim

Book Title: The Dragon’s Promise
Author: Elizabeth Lim
Genre: Young Adult fantasy
Published: August 30, 2022
482 pages
My rating: 4/5

“The bottom of the Taijin Sea tasted of salt, slime, and disappointment. But for a few faint beams of mysterious light, it was darker than the deepest chasm. Hardly the magnificent watery realm dragons were said to call home.”

Princess Shiori promised her late stepmother to return a dragon’s pearl to its rightful owner, a mysterious half-dragon, half-demon known as the Wraith. Keeping that promise turns out more dangerous than she could have imagined. A religious sect wants to kill her because of her magical skills, while a bloodthirsty demon has his eyes on the dangerous and capricious pearl with a mind of its own – sometimes helping Shiori, sometimes deserting her when she needs it the most.

Camp NaNoWriMo Week 3 Recap

Week three of Camp NaNoWriMo was a bit of a struggle. I started editing Chapter 7 of Project Prehistory at the end of week two, and I finished editing it on week three of April. Then it was time to move on to Chapter 7. That chapter is the one that needs the most edits of all the chapters in the manuscript. I'm changing the setting of the first scene, and that meant major rewrites. The second scene needs only minor edits, but I'm swapping the order of the last two scenes. That means that I need to change a lot of things to make the scenes make sense, but I think the chapter will be stronger after that.

The first scene of Chapter 7 took the rest of the week to figure out. I took some time off to visit the nearest library and to go houseplant shopping. You can watch the vlog below to find out more about what I got.

I spent Friday editing the second of the two short stories I want to revise during Camp Nano. The second short story is a contemporary fiction, and it was a difficult piece to edit as well. It took me some time to get into the story and reacquaint myself with the narrator's voice. I had hoped to edit half of the short story on Friday, but I only ended up editing about one third of it.

I expect week four of Camp Nano to be full of more struggles as I continue with Chapter 7 and the contemporary fiction short story.

Camp NaNoWriMo Week 2 Recap

Like my first week of Camp NaNoWrimo, the second week of Camp was very productive! Project Prehistory felt like a bit of a struggle, but I managed to finish editing it on Thursday. I'm mostly doing sentence level edits, and it's sometimes difficult to try to figure out how to make an okay sentence even better, or how whether I need to delete a sentence or to add in a new one to make a paragraph flow smoothly.

My major win for the week happened on Friday, when I switched gears and edited a short story instead. I wrote the first draft of this particular story last November during NaNoWriMo, and the first draft is already in such a good shape that I didn't need to do any developmental edits to it and could move straight to line edits. I edited the whole 5000 word short story in one day.

You can find out more about how my second week of Camp went from this video:

Author Interview with Cinasee Pollett

Cinasee Pollett's debut novel WildWood Revisited was one of my favorite reads of 2023, and I recently read it again. You can find my review of the book here. Read more about her book, her thoughts on writing and self-publishing, and what she's working on next!

Your debut novel WildWood Revisited took you a long time to write and edit. Can you tell us a little bit about the process?

The idea for “Tome Travellers” came about when I was 16. My interests at the time revolved around Sherlock Holmes, The Hobbit, and an old British spy series called Sandbaggers. More than anything, I wished I could live in the Shire or sit with Holmes in his flat at 221b.

What if I could? became the foundational question for my novel.

Over the years, I worked on a dozen different drafts, each with the same cast but set in different time periods, with different books, and varying levels of espionage. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, and Pride & Prejudice were all different volumes the cast Travelled into at one point or another. However, none of them ever felt quite right.

I think I needed to reach a certain stage of life and experience certain things before the final draft could be realized. When I decided to take on the challenge of crafting a book-within-a-book (WildWood) instead of using existing British Literature… I knew I had stumbled onto the final draft. 

Book Review: WildWood Revisited by Cinasee Pollett

WildWood Revisited by Cinasee Pollett

Book Title: WildWood Revisited
Author: Cinasee Pollett
Genre: Historical fantasy
Published: May 22, 2023
252 pages
My rating: 5/5

“Angela scowled. If she’d heard the Laws of Literature once, she’d heard them a thousand times from her uncle—only first editions were Travellable, books had to remain open whilst Travelling, and plots must not be changed. She would remember them if she lived to be a thousand.”

Angela Graham is a Tome Traveler. She can enter any book she wants – as long as it’s a first edition. Her favorite novel, WildWood, would be the perfect escape from the harsh reality of life after World War I, if only its ending wasn’t so dismal. When she learns that someone has tampered with the book’s plot, she seeks help from the book’s reluctant author Aspen DeBryn to save her beloved woodland and its goblin residents.

Camp NaNoWriMo Week 1 Recap

I had a very productive first week of Camp NaNoWriMo (you can find out more about my April writing goals here). I edited Chapter 4 of Project Prehistory, and I read the two short stories I want to edit in April three times in preparation for the edits. The first short story is a modern fantasy. It's an emotional read, and I cried while reading it for the first time in months. The first draft is so good that I think it only requires minor line edits before it's ready for publication. The second short story (contemporary fiction) needs a lot more work, but I have a clear idea of what I want to do to it to make it better.

If you want to learn more about what I did during my first week of Camp Nano, check the video below!

March wrap-up and April goals

  

March reads

March wrap-up

• Finished: 9
• Started but not finished: 2
• Total pages read: 2,137
• Average rating: 4.06

In March, I finished three modern fiction novels. One of them, Cinasee Pollett’s WildWood Revisited, was a reread, and I will post a review of it later this month. My favorite (new) read in March was Amanda Darcy’s Of Love & Beer (5/5 stars). I also read Tricia Cresswell’s The Midwife (3/5 stars), which unfortunately did not live up to its premise with its disappointing ending.