Dawn of the Flame Sea by Jean Johnson – Review & Interview

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Description:
They call themselves the Fae Rii, or Fair Traders. Elfin-like beings capable of wielding sophisticated forms of magic, they travel between universes exploring new worlds and establishing settlements for their people to live peacefully among the locals.

The humans of the White Sands tribe, refugees fleeing from powerful enemies, see the Fae as potential invaders stealing their newfound natural resources. Jintaya, the leader of the Fae travelers, manages to forge an alliance, promising to trade skills and knowledge—magical and otherwise—to build a lasting community.

But the Circle Fire Tribe has no desire to share those rich valleys and ravines with the people they’ve hunted to near extinction—or the supposed deities they worship…

Review:

Dawn of the Flame Sea by Jean Johnson is the 1^st book in her new fantasy series, Flame Seas.  This is my first book by Jean Johnson, and I wasn’t sure what to expect in this different type of fantasy novel.  I will say that when I finished this book, I was hooked into this new world building of Johnson’s creation.

Dawn of the Flame Sea begins as a group of Fae’s known as Fae Rii, who are Fair Traders that explore the different worlds that they can find and make them habitual for other Fae’s to eventually live, intermingling with the human locals.   The Fae Rii leader, Jintaya is our heroine, though this is ensemble storyline.  Jintaya is a healer, with very powerful Fae magic; and though strong and tough, she is kind, calm, and reasonable.   She arrives in this land with her team of fellow fae, who each have magic to create a wonderful home in a deserted area.

The White Sands tribe are humans, who have been trying to find a place to live with water and food to hunt, as well as escape an evil tribe that is out to slave them.  The leader of the tribe, Hajek, is injured, but must meet with this new group that has claimed the area they had hoped to live in.  At first they feel threatened by these unusual people, who they watched from afar create with powerful magic livable homes, and other creations; such as water fountains,  within the caves and land. When Jintaya heals Hajek, the tribe slowly begins to trust the fae and will accept their rules, as it gives them a place to call home, in a wonderful environment that the Fae Rii have created. 

With Jintaya leading the way, we get to see the two groups come together as one, as the land grows bigger, enabling many to have their own homes. Soon they will become known as the tribe of the Flame Sea, and the fae will be known as the Pantheon of the Flame Sea.

This was a slow build story, as we get to know many characters of both groups, and how they all learn to live together.  Mixed race (human/fae) children will be born, and much of the two customs will blend together.   It will also be exciting, as Jintaya and eventually her warrior, Ban must face an evil tribe that followed the White Sands tribe to capture them and slave them.  To say too much more will be spoilers.  Dawn of the Flame Sea was a different type of story, but in any fantasy storyline, the first book will introduce the world and its characters, which can start off somewhat slow.  However, that being said, as I kept reading, I found this fascinating and interesting.  It is very well written by Jean Johnson.  There is expected to be two more books in this trilogy, I am curious to see where she will take this next.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher

Hi Jean.Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions today.We are always looking forward to reading about the author behind the book.  

TRC:  Would you please tell us something about yourself? 

Jean.  I’m a geek.  Flat-out nerdy geek.  I love researching science, delving into archaeology, history, bushcraft, botany, biology, you name it.  I grew up watching fantasy and science fiction, and because for a while we were living in a little patch of rurality where it was difficult to find other kids to play who were my age,  I ended up reading a lot.  Mostly fantasy and science fiction, of course, then one of my mother’s friends slipped me a Harlequin Romance ot read, and I got hooked on that genre, too. But it always comes back to how geeky I am.  I’ll do research for any and all of my stories, whether that’s tea plantations and cheese making for a romance, or trying to figure out which magnetosphere would be stronger, Earth’s or Jupiter’s, if the Earth orbited Jupiter. (It would be Jupiter’s; the Jovian magnetosphere is huge, 20,000x that of Earth!  And there, you have now learned a geeky factoid. Bwahaha, I have taught you something!)  

TRC:  Have you always been interested in writing?When and how did you first start writing? 

Jean.  .  To be honest, my first grade teacher despaired of me ever learning how to read, until she hit on the idea of making it a competition between me and my school friend at that time.  And then, when I realized how wonderful reading was, my other teachers always despaired, because they kept finding me reading books in class under the edge of my desk.  I made friends with the librarians, frequented libraries, the works. Then, when I was about eight years old, I read a book where I didn’t like the ending of it.  I thought to myself, “I can write a better ending than that!”  and I tried to write it…and it was crap…and I knew it was crap.  But I had fun, so I kept doing it.  When I was about fifteen, it dawned on me that writing had always been a constant in my career aspirations, so I finally started putting it first.  After that, well, it took twenty years to get good enough to get noticed by an editor and officially published.  

TRC:  Dawn of the Flame Sea is the first book in your new Flame Sea series. How did you come up with the idea of this book?  Can you please tell us about the premise of this series? 

Jean:.  When I saw the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the location they chose for the resting place of the Holy Grail fascinated me, and the more I learned about Petra, and the Nabateans who settled that arid region—true hydrological geniuses, they fed and watered a nation of tens of thousands on just eleven inches of rain a year—the more fascinated I became. I also had the opportunity to visit Israel several years back on a two week archaeological tour.  We never got over to see Petra, but the more I learned, the more I wondered about how people learned how to live in such a harsh climate.  I’m from the Pacific Northwest, trees and water and rain everywhere, and it’s fairly easy to grow crops.  So seeing all that desert and realizing how hard people’s lives must have been, fascinated me.  Knowing that the Bedouin continued to use those cliff-carved shelters long after the Nabatean empire fell made me wonder what it also must have been like to be surrounded by the rubble of a great empire, to grow up with all these crumbling monuments.  Would the locals take them for granted?  Would they be curious about who used to live and build there?  Would they make up stories to go alongside what little they actually knew? I didn’t first think to put elves into a desert setting.  I know it has been done before in Richard and Wendy Pini’s ElfQuest series.  But I did want to write a story about a desert empire of some sort, and after working on that project for a little while, I realized I could tie it into another universe of stories I’d been working on, and I could tie that one into a third…let’s just say I don’t write small stories.  But that second universe, it had a race of elven beings already established in it, and I realized I’d stuck those elves in a setting with abundant resources—forests and fields, plenty of rain, technological and magical advances, that sort of thing.   It made me wonder, what would happen if I took these advanced elves and stuck them in a place that wasn’t their usual sort of forested environment?  They already had a reputation in that other univese of opening portals to other worlds to trade and so forth, so…I just started weaving them into my desert kingdom storyline.  And that was when I realized I had something awesome building up, because any time you travel to a new environment, there are going to be changes in your lifestyle, with adaptations needed, and consequences of interacting with the new environment that will have to be dealt with, which gave me plenty of material for the story. 

TRC:  Can you please give us a brief description of the first book, Dawn of the Flame Sea?  How many books are you planning for this series? 

Jean:  Dawn of the Flame Sea follows the establishment of a trading settlement of the Fae Rii, a highly advanced race, among a tribe of primitive, Bronze Age-era humans deep in a rocky, sand-strewn desert.  The humans have enemies they need help to avoid, the elves have rules about intermingling too much, and the world itself is conspiring to affect and alter the newcomers in ways that are a tiny bit alarming.  But the Fae Rii are a patient race, living several times the typical lifespan of a human, so they are willing to wait and watch carefully. So far, there are three books that will be coming out, Dawn of the Flame Sea, Demons of the Flame Sea—which I am currently writing—and Gods of the Flame Sea.  Most of my other series are closed; they’re planned with specific first and last books in mind.  This one is more of an ongoing story.  If people like the first trilogy and want more, then I’ll happily write the next part of the story, which is the establishment of the Empire of the Flame Sea.  Eventually, that will lead up to the era of the short story “Birthright” which of course takes place at some point during the height of the Empire. I do one day hope to get around to a second story set in that era, plus other stories farther along in time.  I have a loose outline of around three thousand years of history to play with so far, plus there are other regions around this world with different cultures, lands to the south, east, north, and west that could be explored.  If people like it and want more of it, I will put it on the schedule to write it.  

TRC:  You write multiple genres, such as SciFi, Fantasy, ParanormalRomance.   Which do you find the most challenging & why? 

Jean:  Of the genres in which I do write…if I were to write Contemporary Romance, that would be the absolute hardest for me.  I’ve tried, but I have always wanted to throw in some sort of fantastical or futuristic element.  Second hardest would be Historical Romance.  Not because it’d be particularly difficult, but because I have far too many historical buff friends who know where I live, so if I got anything wrong…!  Oddly enough, this combination means I tend to write a lot of Paranormal and Fantasy Romance because I can incorporate the elements of a particular period in time into a story set in a fantasy world region or culture, without worrying about historical inaccuracies. Of those genres I don’t write…I think writing a children’s story would be the most difficult, because the language involved needs to be greatly simplified without “dumbing down” the way the story treats the reader.  I haven’t read or written simplified language since I started reading at the collegiate level when I was around twelve or so.  That means I’d be rusty at trying, let alone succeeding.  The last thing I’d want to do is insult any child by writing a story that comes across as condescending. Second most difficult would probably be either Contemporary (for the same reason as Romance; must put in something fantastical!) or Horror.  I’m working on my tendency to protect my characters from harm, but I doubt I’ll ever be a George R.R. Martin.

TRC:  Can you please tell us what you working on now, and what you have upcoming in 2016/2017?

Jean:  I am working on Demons of the Flame Sea, which takes place a few decades after the first book ends.  In Demons, we get to meet a new race of interdimensional visitors, the Efrijt…and unlike the Fair Traders, who believe in giving others a fair trade, they’re a bit more “deal with the devil” in how they treat others.  They’re after some very specific things, and while they will stick to the letter of any contract, they will wreack havoc with its spirit whenever and wherever they think they can get away with it.  At the same time, the Fae Rii are dealing with a crisis of a different kind, and the fallout from that will leave the settlers struggling to deal with everything. Gods of the Flame Sea picks up several years after Demons end, and in it, we’ll get to see how the Fae Rii’s attempt to deal with the Efrijt, and the Efrijt’s attempt to wrest control from the Fae Rii…well, it backfires in a rather unpleasant fashion.  Chaos will dance across the sands of the Flame Sea before that story is through. After that, I will be getting back to my paranormal romance series, Guardians of Destiny.  I still have the fourth book to write, THE TEMPLE, which will be a very racy novel involving the kink of sensation play.  Guardians is planned as another eight book series, tied into the eight book Sons of Destiny series, so I’ll have four more after that to write in that universe.  But I know a lot of readers also want more of my science fiction series—I’m calling that one the Hand of Fate universe—plus whateve InterMix readers will want next of the Flame Sea, if anything, and then there are several other universe still lurking in the wings, waiting to be explored.  Among them, a superhero universe, steampunk fantasy, science fiction romance, high fantasy set in the realm the Fae Rii come from…oodles and loads of things I could work on, easily.  

TRC:  What is your writing process?  Do you like to outline your story before you start? Do you have a specific place you like to write?  Is there a special time of day that works best for you? 

Jean:  .  I do a mix of things.  Mostly, I start with What-If questions, though sometimes I get ideas from trying to make sense of dreams.  When I get an idea for a story concept, I run it through my head several times, turning it over and over, looking for holes to poke at and patch over.  I will work on the characters involved, writing down notes on them and tweaking things until they speak to me as individuals with personalities…and sometimes that doesn’t happen until I put them into the actual story, but oh well. Then, either just before or within the first 10,000 words, I’ll write down various plot points on sticky notes and arrange them more or less in chronological order, to work as an outline of what will come next.  This is, of course always subject to change; one story, for a while there…for every one sticky note I removed from having been written into the story, I was putting in two more.  Other stories, I veer off in a new and much more intriguing direction, and have to trash half the sticky note points without ever incorporating them.  But I usually retain the major points along the way. I liken it to taking a road trip on Interstate 90.  Most people don’t realize it stretches from Seatte in the west to Boston in the East, and you know you have to go through Chicago at some point…but say you’re going through Montana and you see a sign advertising World’s Biggest Ball of Purple Yarn, and hey, your favorite color is purple, you love knitting, so let’s detour that way!  And then you’re gone off the main highway and are driving around on side roads and back roads for a while, exploring areas you didn’t originally think you’d visit, before finally getting back on I-90 to go the rest of the way…until you’re in the Dakotas and ooh, World’s Second Biggest Ball of Green Yarn! As for a specific place and time, at my computer in my office.  My handwriting sucketh mightily.  I might do some handwritten notes, but mostly, typing is my friend.  Time-wise, I just need blocks of uninterrupted time.  I am a natural night-owl, so I can often be found writing late into the night.  It’s quiet, nobody bothers me, it’s all good.  

TRC:  When you are not writing, what other interests or hobbies do you have? 

Jean:  I like to research things, do some hands-on learning… I’m not the world’s greatest swimmer, but my mother and I love going to water parks.  We also enjoy traveling together; I visited Melbourne, Australia on my own for one of the World Science Fiction Conventions few years back, but my mother has traveled with me ever since, to places like Reno, Chicago, San Antonio, London in the UK, and more.  This year, WorldCon is in Kansas City, and the next year in Helsinki, Finland; I have a friend who married a Finn and they’re living in Helsinki, so I am very much looking forward to that trip.  Mostly, though, I’m a homebody.  I had some health setbacks, and have finally gotten back to the point where I can write full time, so I’m working hard on catching up with all the stuff that’s overdue.  Once I’ve done that, I’ll get to dive into yet more research on new projects, and in general just have a fantastic time crafting stories that I want to read—no one else is writing the exact stories I want to read, which means it’s up to me to get it done—and hopefully making them interesting enough for everyone else to enjoy, too.

TRC:  Many authors have friends or family, that they bounce ideas and information back and forth.  Do you have anyone you like to discuss your story with?   

Jean:  Readers have seen me mentioning several people in my Author’s Notes, but I’d like to mention a couple more at this time, and give them each a shout-out.  Not only because they’ve given me some great feedback, but also because I’ve been privileged to help out them as well. First is Stephanie Weippert, who just got a YA book published, Sweet Secrets, through TANSTAAFL Press.  We’ve been meeting to talk shop over lunch for years, discussing and helping each other on our various plot problems an d ideas.  I am very proud of her getting noticed and published. Her story Sweet Secrets is a What If that asks the question, what if cooking was a form of magic?  What if chocolate-pecan-caramel “turtles” actually came to life and started crawling around?  Or butterfly-shaped cookies that could actually fly?  And what if a stepfather, charged with watching his stepson all on his own for the very first time, saw his kid disappear right before his eyes, thanks to a culinary war between the world’s two greatest chef-mages?  I think everyone is going to love her stories. The other is K.B. Spangler, who is the artist and author of the webcomic A Girl And Her Fed.  Brook came up with a huge storyline involving political conspiracies, cyborgs, a ghostly pixie army led by Benjamin Franklin, and a superintelligent koala.  Since then, she has not only kept up the webcomic, but has written five books set in the same universe, three of which are detective novels, one of which is a thriller, and one of which is paranormal science fiction.  Her writing is superb.  She started as someone who didn’t have much in the way of professional art training, and it has evolved into what I think is an unique and fantastic style…but then again, I’m also partial to her earlier drawings.  They were very simplistic, but conveyed quite a lot of meaning all the same. The great thing about Brook’s creativity is that if you like graphic novels and comic books, she’s got a huge archive of the webcomic to go through; if you prefer prose, she’s got five whole novels to wade through, with more on the way.  She’s allowed me to take a sneak peek at her novels before they come out, and I am eagerly awaiting the sixth. 

TRC:  Would you like to add anything else? 

Jean:  One of the projects I’m working on concurrently with the Flame Sea and other novels is a serialized story called Cellworld.  It’s a prose story, but it’ll be released like a comic book series, with purchaseable chapter-issues every month.  Once again, a What-If question sparked the idea for the series, and that question is:  What if people from a really advanced, high tech society had to figure out how to survive on an alien world with only access to primitive tools and/or low technology?  How did they get into this situation, and what challenges will they have to face? I’ll have more details about the Cellworld series on my website, www.JeanJohnson.net, as things progress.  I can be contacted through there, as well as via Twitter, @JeanJAuthor.  

LIGHTNING ROUND  

Favorite Food:  Argh, it’s tough to choose just one!  …Cheese, I guess 

Favorite Dessert:  Ice Cream, Coldstone Creamery 

Favorite Movie:  So many movies…  Probably a comedy, like Oscar, or Clue. 

Favorite TV Show:  Babylon 5. 

Favorite Movie or TV Celebrity:  Patrick Steward, Lucy Lawless, many more 

Dark or Milk Chocolate:  Dark, Grand Noir 85% by Michel Cluizel 

Favorite literary character (not your own):  Rachel Peng, from K.B. Spangler’s detective novels. 

Dog or Cat:  Absolutely cat.  I’m allergic to dogs.  At the moment, I am pestered by one cat, Kitty; her previous owner named her that, and I’m tempted to rename her Hera (she’s all-white like Ceiling Cat, but more like an Old Goddess in attitude, capricious, cantankerous, etc), but I love her all the same.   T

TRC:   Thank you, Jean, for answering our questions. The Reading Café wishes you the best of luck with Dawn of the Flame Sea.