Meet MF Sullivan, author of The Hierophant's Daughter

Welcome to the book tour for The Hierophant's Daughter by M.F. Sullivan! Today she's letting us get to know her a little bit better, while also giving us some insight into her latest book. Please also enjoy an excerpt before you download your own copy. Follow the tour and leave plenty of questions and comments for the author as you continue to get to know her. And then be sure to enter the giveaway at the end!

Have you ever had an imaginary friend?

Of course! I give them whole worlds to ruin. Now that I’m into the occult (tarot was clearly an influence on, if nothing else, the structure of The Disgraced Martyr Trilogy—my cover artist, Nuno Moreira, did a wonderful job evoking tarot cards with the covers! The Hierophant’s Daughter is only the first beautiful example.

Do you have any phobias?

Heights, flying, needles—but I’m doing immunotherapy so I won’t be as allergic to my new black cat, Israel, so hopefully by the end I’ll be immune to phobia 3!

Do you listen to music when you're writing?

I must. I’ve talked in the past with another blogger about how important music is to me. The best thing a writer can do for themselves is to create a playlist and listen to it constantly, always envisioning the scenes of their story as inspiration calls. Listen to it so much that your knowledge of these images becomes routine, and when you sit down to write with this playlist, all your work will be second-nature to you.

Do you ever read your stories out loud?

Absolutely. Every third or fourth draft is like that—it helps me fix a lot of intolerable wording I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

Tell us about your main character and who inspired him/her.

General Dominia di Mephitoli, Former Governess of the United Front and the Bitch of Europa, is not just The Hierophant’s Daughter—she’s one of the most feared martyrs on the planet due to her prolific military career. That said, what I love about Dominia is her emotional complexity. While she thinks like a soldier, her political career—and her love of her dead wife, Cassandra di Mephitoli, whose death drives the plot of all three books even before the story has begun—has made her more emotional than that, and more attached to the human race than the rest of her cannibalistic martyr brethren. Part of her journey is about learning to honor those emotions, and learning to honor the horrors committed by the person that she was while acknowledging her ability to change into a new, better person.

I think one of the things I wanted to accomplish with this story was an LGBTQ protagonist, but I didn’t know any of that stuff about Dominia’s personal life going in. The most important thing for me was that the character’s problems not arise out of being gay—I respect YA coming-of-age tropes and the absolute bravery with which gay people must face the world to admit to being themselves, but I think the best way to create a world where LGBTQ people are normalized is to show them a world where they already are. So, when writing the plot, I basically wanted Dominia’s experience to be comparable in every way to that of a male sci-fi hero rescuing his wife. One of the ways I did that was by looking at one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, a young woman who’s a lesbian long after she’s a dynamic, reliable, intelligent and powerful human being. While she and Dominia are two very different people, I think I found that initial spark of the General’s motivations and self in the heart of my friend, Amber.

The Hierophant's Daughter

By 4042 CE, the Hierophant and his Church have risen to political dominance with his cannibalistic army of genetically modified humans: martyrs. In an era when mankind's intergenerational cold wars against their long-lived predators seem close to running hot, the Holy Family is poised on the verge of complete planetary control. It will take a miracle to save humanity from extinction.

It will also take a miracle to resurrect the wife of 331-year-old General Dominia di Mephitoli, who defects during martyr year 1997 AL in search of Lazarus, the one man rumored to bring life to the dead. With the Hierophant's Project Black Sun looming over her head, she has little choice but to believe this Lazarus is really all her new friends say he is--assuming he exists at all--and that these companions of hers are really able to help her. From the foulmouthed Japanese prostitute with a few secrets of her own to the outright sapient dog who seems to judge every move, they don't inspire a lot of confidence, but the General has to take the help she can get.

After all, Dominia is no ordinary martyr. She is THE HIEROPHANT'S DAUGHTER, and her Father won't let her switch sides without a fight. Not when she still has so much to learn.

The dystopic first entry of an epic cyberpunk trilogy, THE HIEROPHANT’S DAUGHTER is a horror/sci-fi adventure sure to delight and inspire adult readers of all stripes.

Read an excerpt:

VIII

Miki Soto

What couldn’t a person access from the Japanese Internet? The question inspired Dominia to get out of the bathtub for another look at the card. There was no address, whether web or physical, as there hadn’t been an address on the ad floating across that billboard; instead, when she studied the lotus embossed upon the card, the DIOX-I highlighted it as though it were a link. How fascinating, this augmented reality! After fixing the device’s settings back to manual control, she “clicked” on the link with an unsteady wink, and her right field of vision was covered by the floating window of a browser. Had she cochlear implants, she would have heard some sort of music, or even a voice accompanying the woman’s writhing in and out of the browser’s dark: less a whole person, and more a disembodied assortment of lips, fingers, lower backs, and thighs. At last, the vision disappeared to present her with the crimson words, “WELCOME TO THE RED MARKET.”

A button appeared: “Connect Your Halcyon for Age Verification.” The idea of giving the women of the international and highly loathed illegal organization any information might have stopped her in a simpler time, as it surely stopped 70 percent of potential Red Market customers—the ones able to access the site, anyway, inaccessible from Europa and the Front through traditional routes. That had been all the Hierophant could do to combat in any meaningful way the world’s oldest profession-cum-cult. Far trickier than hampering Internet access was controlling in-person transactions in gold or silver, or the off-brand cryptocurrency, Redcoin; and because there were almost no freelance prostitutes left in the world, catching a working girl was difficult.

Buy/Review Links:

Amazon * NetGalley * Goodreads * Barnes & Noble  

Hardback: 978-0-9965395-6-2

Paperback: 978-0-9965395-7-9

eBook: 978-0-9965395-8-6

About M.F. Sullivan

M.F. Sullivan is the author of Delilah, My Woman, The Lightning Stenography Device, and a slew of plays in addition to the Trilogy. She lives in Ashland, Oregon with her boyfriend and her cat, where she attends the local Shakespeare Festival and experiments with the occult. Find more information about her work (and plenty of free essays) at https://www.paintedblindpublishing.com!

Author Links:

Blog: https://www.paintedblindpublishing.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TheRealMFS

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/M.-F.-Sullivan/e/B013DDEQVE

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14199461.M_F_Sullivan

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