[Blog Tour] The God Queen by M.L. Tishner

The God Queen
M.L. Tishner
(The Rebirth Saga, #1)
Publication date: October 22nd 2019
Genres: Fantasy, New Adult, Science Fiction

The God Queen returns. So, why is everyone squelching her power?

In a backwater Earth town, Rei Ettowa dreams of traveling across the stars to destroy Infiernen – the knight who murdered her brother.

When Rei discovers she is the reincarnation of the prophesied God Queen, she relishes her newfound ability to channel lightning for revenge. Unfortunately, blazing through a battlefield clashes with the Federation’s plan for Rei and the others like her. All the gods are to be trained as diplomatic figureheads to sway voters, not agents of war. Infiernen must remain untouched.

Unable to let go of her brother’s murder, Rei finds Infiernen. But instead of killing him, Rei discovers a secret the Federation has been keeping from her about her brother.

Now Rei is mad as hell. Her enemies must pay. But who are they? And what else is the Federation hiding from her?

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Author Bio:

Mari, a native Hoosier, currently lives in southern Germany where she entertains people with her adventures as an American expat in the Land of Beer and Pretzels on her blog adventuresoflamari.com as well as the adventures of her pugs, Abner and Roxy. When she’s not writing, Mari cooks, snowboards, dances to the beat of her own drum, reads late into the night, and binge watches Netflix with her husband. The God Queen is her debut novel.

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I asked the author:

"What is the story behind the story?"

It’s been so long since I first created these characters; it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t somewhere in the back of my mind.

I was thirteen and sitting in my aunt’s living room in Lima, Peru when the idea first struck. I’m half-Peruvian and in an attempt to better my Spanish, my mom would ship me off to her home country alone for the summer so that I could better my language. It was 1999 and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had just come out and I, of course, saw it in Spanish with my cousins.

I have always been a huge Star Wars fan and at the time I was also an even bigger Sailor Moon fan. Those stories spoke to me on a level that nothing else could and I wanted an adventure with a heroine who had the nobility of Luke Skywalker, the powers of Sailor Jupiter, and had an epic love story that spans previous lifetimes like Sailor Moon. YA was not the juggernaut that it is now so finding stories with that kind of heroine was almost non-existent—aside from Tamora Pierce. So I decided to write what I wanted to read.

I have written and re-written Rei’s adventures (Rei named after Sailor Mars) more often than I’d like to admit. But every version of the story taught me a little more about the craft of writing. I tried to get one version of the story traditionally published when I was eighteen and I actually received constructive feedback from a publishing house: great ideas, but too many! They were right and it was something I still think about today in my thirties. To be honest, I still have a problem with too many ideas.

Eventually, you can only rewrite the story so much before you have to decide what to do with it. That decision came to me in 2018 when I was living in Germany and moved with my husband to his hometown. I was working as a microbiologist up to that point and there weren’t any labs close to our new home so I was unemployed and had a lot of time to think. I then decided to pursue my writing more seriously and finally put Rei and Bronx’s story out into the world.

Of course, I was no longer the young thirteen-year-old girl writing a wish-fulfilling fantasy, but I still wrote what I wanted to read. Rei was also about thirteen when I first created her, but now she’s a young woman in her early twenties who grew up when I did. Her story was no longer a coming of age, but a story of already being self-actualized but also learning to evolve. There’s also more romance, but I didn’t want Rei and Bronx’s relationship to consist of “will they or won’t they”. I wanted them to navigate what sort of relationship they wanted to have and how to work as a team.

I debated between going the traditional route or indie. I settled on indie for this series only because it has been background noise for such a long period of my life that I wanted full control of the project. I have plenty of other projects now that I am happy to take traditional, but the Rebirth Saga will always be mine. Of course, I the hired an editor who really helped me take my writing to the next level and eventually The God Queen was ready for publication.

I am so proud of how The God Queen turned out, but I am still learning. I feel like I finally found the story I wanted to tell with Rei and Bronx and I have since used what I learned from TGQ as I wrote their next adventure in The Last Imperator. I hope people see this story and know they shouldn’t give up on their dreams. It may take longer than you hoped, but it doesn’t make the end result any less sweeter.

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