"She Dreamed of Dragons" by Elizabeth J.M. Walker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Blog Tour for Elizabeth J.M. Walker's Young Adult Fantasy Novel, She Dreamed of Dragons!!

 

Follow the tour to read exclusive excerpts, guest posts, reviews, and spotlights.

Could a dragon mage be the next ruler of the magical kingdom of Dorlith?

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Title: She Dreamed of Dragons

Author Name:  Elizabeth J.M. Walker

Genre(s): Young Adult, Fantasy

Length: Approx. 234 page

Ebook ISBN:  978-0-9947490-6-2

Print ISBN:  978-0-9947490-5-5

Release Date: July 17, 201

Publisher:  Mirror World Publishing
 

This is a re-release tour.  Book previously published through a different publishing company

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About She Dreamed of Dragons:
 

Trina is a fifteen-year-old dragon mage in a kingdom ruled by witches and wizards – the same people who have brought dragons and other magical creatures near extinction. Trina can barely control her fire powers and is desperate for an apprenticeship, but finding a fellow dragon mage to be her teacher is proving more difficult than coming across an actual dragon.

Then there’s the Royal Tourney – a competition presented by the Queen to find a successor to the throne. Trina heads to the competition in the hopes of sparking some interest in the mage society and earning herself an apprenticeship.

She never intended to be a frontrunner in the competition.

She never meant to catch the attention of the evil witch trying to take over the throne.

She never expected to fall for a wizard.

Now Trina must face tough decisions about who she is and who she could become. Trina must ask herself: Can she really win the Royal Tourney?

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Excerpt:

Trina ran her finger over the spines of the books and looked over her shoulder, down to where the main door was. How long would the librarian be gone? If she could just read some of these books on witches, she could know all their secrets: how their magic worked, their spells, how to use a wand, how to make her own flying broomstick…

“I found them!” she heard Paisley say from down the aisle as she piled her arms full of books.

“Mmm-hmm,” Trina said as she took a book from the shelf entitled Finding the Right Man, Cauldron and Wand for the Young Bachelorette Witch.

The book was bound in pink leather and the title was written on the cover in gold. She took another look over her shoulder and then opened the book, rifling through the pages.

“It’s blank…” she said aloud as she looked at the empty pages of the book.

“Mine aren’t,” Paisley said as she rushed over. “Just look at this pattern!”

Trina hastily put the book back and pulled out a brown leather one entitled Love Spells Made Easy and flipped through it—blank again. She took another one from the shelf to find it was blank as well.

“Trina!” Paisley said, noticing the books her sister was trying to read. “You’re not supposed to look at those!”

Trina frowned. “I know…it’s just…”

“It looks like they’re spelled or something, anyway, so we can’t read them,” Paisley said, peering over at the book Trina held.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Trina agreed and put the book back with a pang of guilt. Maybe it was for the best. Witches and wizards were very secretive about their powers. She would just end up feeling even guiltier if she had actually found out information she wasn’t supposed to know.

*****

Purchase Links:
 

Amazon Kindle - US

http://amzn.to/1M1Ctat
 

Amazon Paperback - US

http://amzn.to/1dVVRYG
 

Mirror World Publishing -

http://mirror-world-publishing.myshopify.com/products/she-dreamed-of-dragons-e-book

Barnes & Noble -

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/she-dreamed-of-dragons-elizabeth-j-m-walker/1120223680?ean=9780994749055
 

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Meet the Author:
 

 

Elizabeth J. M. Walker lives in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She has always loved books and writing. As a teen she discovered zines, which inspired her to publish her own litzine of odd fairy tales for over a decade.

She Dreamed of Dragons is her first novel.

Connect with her on her website: www.elizabethjmwalker.com
 

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Follow the Tour - Schedule Posted at the Following Link: 

http://saphsbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/tour-schedule-re-release-of-she-dreamed.html
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meet Anne Montgomery, author of "A Light in the Desert"

I'm delighted to introduce you to my author friend Anne Montgomery. Anne is visiting today with her new release A Light in the Desert, an intriguing Soft Thriller novel I think you'll enjoy.

A Light in the Desert traces the story of a pregnant teenager who bears an odd facial deformity, a Vietnam veteran and former Special Forces sniper who, as he descends into the throes of mental illness, latches onto the girl, and a group of Pentecostal zealots – the Children of Light – who have been waiting over thirty years in the Arizona desert for Armageddon. 

The Amtrak Sunset Limited, a passenger train en route to Los Angeles, is derailed in their midst’s, a deadly act of sabotage. Their lives are thrown into turmoil when local and state police, FBI investigators, and a horde of reporters make camp by the twisted wreckage of the Sunset Limited. As the search for the saboteurs continues, the authorities find more questions than answers. The girl mysteriously vanishes, the assassin struggles to maintain his sanity, and a child is about to be born in the wilderness.

EXCERPT

Most of the two hundred and forty-eight passengers on the Sunset Limited were asleep when David Flowers – weaving slightly as the sleeper car rattled along at fifty miles-per-hour – moved along the passageway en route to the bathroom. At the end of the car he saw Mitchell Bates, a twenty-year Amtrak veteran. 

“Don’t forget to get me up when we get to Palm Springs,” the passenger said. “Don’t wanna sleep through my stop.” 

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Bates responded, smiling. “That’s what they pay me for.” 

Two cars back, Kelly sat wide awake, fingers cupped around her eyes, the outside edges of her hands pressed tightly to the window. She could see the moonlit desert careening by, the scattered mountains black against a star-filled night sky. She felt the gentle rolling of the car: a strangely pleasant feeling. A sense of calm surrounded her, maybe because, for the first time since her father died, there were other people who cared about her. Kelly glanced over at Miranda, still engrossed in a two-month-old, dog-eared issue of Glamour Magazine. Had her mother ever had a friend?

Up in the cab, the engineer watched as the massive headlight bathed the track ahead in bright white light. He’d been on this run hundreds of times. A curve that would lead the train onto a trestle that spanned one of the deeper washes between Phoenix and L.A. was just ahead. The headlight blazed – a star shooting in the darkness – wrapping the track in light as harsh as any clear desert day. 

But the damage was under the rails where no light could penetrate. 

****

Ramm was driving on the dirt road that would take him back to the cabin. That edgy, too-much-caffeine feeling gripped him again. He should be on the train, the one protecting Kelly. Had he made a mistake contacting the watchers, which meant he had put himself in play again? The community in which he’d worked for so many years was relatively small and there was always the possibility that word had spread about the debacle in Jerusalem. By contacting the watchers, he might have put himself in jeopardy, which could also bring harm to those around him. 

Ramm’s head began to pound, the migraine accompanied by a hazy aura.  His psychological state was fluctuating. How long could he stay ahead of the problem without medication? What if he blacked out again? What if he was hospitalized and people started checking on him? 

Feeling impotent, powerless, Ramm jammed on the breaks. The truck skidded to a stop on the soft shoulder where blacktop and dirt merged at the turnoff. He rubbed his face hard then gripped the steering wheel. When he looked up and peered through the windshield, Ramm blinked several times, confused.

There, in the night sky before him, floating in a spectral light, was Kelly’s face. Ramm squinted, shutting his eyes tight, then looked again. The ghostly image was still there, hovering before him, her troubled visage beckoning him to follow. She merged with paintings and sculptures – the mother of Jesus in all her quiet grief, the face of Mary on the shimmering white marble of Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Pieta, on Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca, her desolate melancholy depicted by Masaccio, Veneziano, and countless other artists through time. 

Ramm painfully unclenched his hands from around the steering wheel. The suddenness of the bright light caught him off guard. His first reaction was to grab for the loaded Glock he kept under the front seat, but when the glare splashed past him, followed by the steady beat of the passing railcars, he relaxed. 

Then, an unexpected wave of heat engulfed Ramm, and he pushed open the cab door and stepped out, breathing deeply, trying to clear his head. The noise hit him like a blow, shattering the desert calm, causing Ramm to reflexively drop to the ground. He lay there listening to the calamitous groaning, a ghastly noise that washed over him like a rogue wave. 

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To read more from A Light in the Desert please click a vendor's name:

Sarah Book Publishing  -  Amazon  -  Barnes & Noble

 

Anne Montgomery has worked as a television sportscaster, newspaper and magazine writer, teacher, amateur baseball umpire, and high school football referee. She worked at WRBL‐TV in Columbus, Georgia, WROC‐TV in Rochester, New York, KTSP‐TV in Phoenix, Arizona, ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, where she anchored the Emmy and ACE award‐winning SportsCenter, and ASPN-TV as the studio host for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Montgomery has been a freelance and staff writer for six publications, writing sports, features, movie reviews, and archeological pieces.

 

When she can, Anne indulges in her passions: rock collecting, scuba diving, football refereeing, and playing her guitar.

Learn more about Anne Montgomery on Wikipedia. Stay connected on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

Of Symbols and Substance, of Sheep and Wolves...

And, as always, the world turns and a new day dawns.  Everything changes and everything stays the same...

The Supreme Court has ruled that our citizens born with homosexual orientation have the same right to marry as those of our citizens "lucky" enough to be born heterosexual.  Public opinion currently happens to coincide with this ruling, though many still oppose it.  And, as in decades past, with other civil rights rulings, history's wheel turns, but stubborn conservatives and reactionaries still vow to cling to the old ways.

They mean business, those stubborn conservatives and reactionaries.  Those bigots and rabble-rousers.  As they did back in the day when George Wallace cried "Segregation forever," placing himself in the doorway of a public school rather than accept integration.  As thugs and hooligans harassed and brutalized young black students entering integrated schools for the first time.  And, the racist resistance continues to this day, though in more subtle forms.  Some still cling to the past in the form of symbols, like the Confederate flag they want to keep flapping from the flagpoles of state capitals, never dipping it an inch.  When they're told that flag offends many in a deeply personal and cutting way, because it stands for slavery and racism, they say they embrace only the good things that flag represents:  valor on the battlefield, commitment to cause and fellowship.  Conservatives always seem to embrace the shadows of old dreams, ignoring the ugly substance that such shadows mask.  Like wolves hiding in sheep's clothing.

In opposing marriage equality, as in demanding the right to display racist flags, they aim always for the symbols, for the peripheral abstracts.  States' rights.  Constitutional process (as it suits them to interpret it, of course.)  They conveniently ignore the substance of human life, human rights and human dignity.  The Confederate flag is a symbol.  "Traditional" marriage is a symbol.  No matter that those symbols have historically excluded and demeaned, even dehumanized and killed minorities.  Conservatives insist on preserving their precious traditional culture and identity, and they always scream about their rights and about due process.

But, is that really what it's about?  How much have they cared about preserving Constitutional due process when advocating undeclared war or governmental spying and wiretapping?  How often have they cried "lawlessness" over abductions, secret prisons or torture chambers?  They care nothing about law or due process except when society finally gets around to acknowledging the human rights of those historically disenfranchised.  It's no longer fashionable or politically advantageous to demean gay or lesbian people with adolescent profanities or hateful threats of violence, so conservatives stoop to invoking the Constitution (a document they have time and again seen fit to ignore.) They love to invoke tradition, too, because it's always their last fallback position when society moves forward in advancing civil rights.  "It's always been done this way, therefore, it's right."  "Our society will collapse if anything changes; this old way is basic to our way of life."  "What right does the Supreme Court have to impose its will on the people?"  How many times have we heard these stale complaints?  These twisted bits of Orwellian double-think that turn our system of law and basic rights inside-out?

They wave the flag, they wave the Constitution, and they preach traditionalism when it suits them.  But, they lack the moral courage to face the substance of the issues.  The meat of the matter is that they're saying (as they always have) that certain groups of people (a.k.a. white, heterosexual men) have the right to lord it over everybody else.  They hide behind symbols and wave false banners of freedom.  What else can they do, really?  The tide of history will always be against them.  But, they'll always linger in the shadows like termites, trying to eat away at the achievements of progress.

In the end, the stars and bars will come down and the rainbow banners will go up.  But, they'll keep trying.  They always keep trying.  What else can they do?