I was lucky to get an interview with Steve Hugh Westenra, the author of The Wings of Ashtaroth, one of this year’s #SPFBO9 entries.
Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
I’m a SFFH writer living and working in Montreal, Canada. Although originally from England, I grew up on the foggy, eldritch shores of Newfoundland (the setting for Come From Away for all you musical fans!). I’m a trans man and an academic, whose research and teaching focuses on marginalized reclamations of monstrous figures through speculative media. I’m also a historian and regularly lecture on angels and demons in biblical and extra-biblical literature. I’ve been a hobby store manager, facilitator for an adult literacy program training long-term care assistants, and a cashier at McDonald’s. As a twelve-year-old I unironically composed a sure-to-be pop hit called “The Pussy Man” about a homeless cat who becomes a rock superstar. I have two cats (one of whom may really be a stoat), and am passionate about marginalized and animal rights.
Why should I buy your SPFBO9 entry?
It doesn’t totally suck!
The great city of Qemassen is on the brink of destruction. When its high priest burns one of the royal children alive in a desperate sacrifice to the city’s gods, the child’s mother calls down a demonic curse in retaliation—one that unwittingly damns her scheming family and sets in to motion a series of events that will bring Qemassen to its knees. Set in a secondary world based on the conflict between Ancient Carthage and Rome, The Wings of Ashtaroth is a sprawling, multi-POV epic fantasy, full of queerness, political intrigue, and demons. It should appeal to fans of A Song of Ice and Fire and Tad Williams.
“Making up characters and sinking into the worlds imagined by other artists was definitely an escape, but it was also a way, I think, of constructing a community that was more welcoming and exciting than the one around me.”
Subgenre: Political epic fantasy, queer fantasy
Pages: 1390 on Smashwords.
Self-published: 2023 (but it was serialized online starting in 2020).
What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
It’s probably a tired answer, but I’ve been writing and coming up with characters and worlds since I could write. As a kid I was super weird and a bit of an outsider. Making up characters and sinking into the worlds imagined by other artists was definitely an escape, but it was also a way, I think, of constructing a community that was more welcoming and exciting than the one around me. I finished my first novel quite late compared to a lot of writers. The Wings of Ashtaroth was my first finished novel. I wrote it about ten years ago, got some initial interest from publishers and agents, but then shelved it (probably too soon, now that I’m more knowledgeable about querying). I loved the characters and world and wanted to get the story out there, so I dusted it off a few years ago and started publishing it for free as a serialized novel online.
Have you participated in the SPFBO before and where did you hear about the competition?
This is my first time! It’s been my dream for several years to enter, and I’d been vaguely following the contest for a while. I first heard about it from Mark Lawrence’s twitter, but I’m unsure which year. It introduced me to some great fantasy like Senlin Ascends and Devin Madson’s work. I also follow former judge Kitty G’s Booktube and Goodreads, and it was fun seeing her reviews for the entries.
Why did you choose to write fantasy?
I write a broad spectrum of work that tends to straddle genres. At least initially, I think I was drawn to fantasy because the worlds and characters were rich and detailed. As a teenager, my favourite fantasies transported me somewhere new and strange, but which nonetheless made the human element of their narratives central.
The Wings of Ashtaroth is a political epic fantasy with demons and queerness. I came up with the initial concept and some of the main characters when I was in junior high (so about 20 years ago!), and the book was much more demonology-focused back then. I was reacting a lot to Anne Rice’s work, which I didn’t enjoy for the most part (I know, I’m sorry!). In my twenties, as a reader, I started to move away from straight-up fantasy as I just wasn’t finding as much I enjoyed anymore (Tad Williams was an exception!). A friend recommended ASoIaF to me based on the frustrations I was describing, and I fell utterly in love. I think the political piece of Ashtaroth was influenced most by that series. I’m generally interested in work that combines or draws on different genres. Good writing is good writing. Well-drawn characters are well-drawn characters. I draw on all kinds of subgenres in my own work and find that the best art often comes from unusual combinations and permutations. In fantasy, I’ve written everything from super grounded, historically-tinged stuff like Ashtaroth and my lesbian Viking novel Ash, Oak, and Thorn, to the begins of a WIP that’s set in a crumbling floating cathedral in the sky where a group of deaf children is tasked with keeping the last remnants of the world intact by maintaining a library catalogue full of sounds they can’t hear (your guess is as good as mine as to genre!). My most recent finished novel is a horror comedy with dashes of romance.
My work usually includes mysteries of various kinds. I love puzzles and intrigue.
All my books are super queer, though I would say Ashtaroth and Ash, Oak, and Thorn are “incidentally queer” in the sense that queerness isn’t the focus, but moreso a natural feature of the characters’ lives. My horror comedy is much more about queerness and explicitly engages with queer art forms like camp.
Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
This is a hard one to answer! I think everyone’s influenced more than they realize by childhood favourites, but if I end my answer with Sammy Skunk Smells Poo! (a banger of a read), that probably won’t suffice. Early loves included the work of children’s author Zilpha Keatley Snyder, particularly The Egypt Game, the Animorphs series, Tolkien, and His Dark Materials. In my preteens/early teens I became obsessed with the Dragonlance books and dressed as Raistlin Majere for a fashion show in my Grade 7 French class.
One of the fantasists who’s most influenced me is Tad Williams. His Otherland series became a kind of blueprint for what I wanted to learn to do as a writer. He has this wonderful ability to weave complex stories with all these tiny threads that you’re sure he couldn’t possibly tie together by the end, but which he always does. I started reading more “serious” literature as a teen, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita became a HUGE influence. There’s a lot of Bulgakov in Ashtaroth (the former first line of the book—edited out and still mourned on my part—was a reference to the first line of The Master’s novel-within-a-novel and there are still echoes of Pilate’s storyline in Samelqo’s). My influences range from Gogol, GRRM, Octavia Butler, Jo Walton, Garth Ennis, Jeff VanderMeer, Indrapramit Das, Samanta Schweblin, Emily Arsenault, Bram Stoker, Gloria Naylor, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King to Saint Augustine of Hippo.
I’m also very much inspired by film, television and video games (Silent Hill, David Lynch, Tarsem Singh, etc). Tarsem Singh’s visual language was a HUGE influence on Ashtaroth.
If you were to win the SPFBO, what impact do you think this would have on your writing career?
Astronomical! For me it’s hard to imagine, and I’m honestly not sure what it would entail or look like, but as someone who sucks at self-promo it would be a massive boon to me to have that exposure. For years I’ve held onto the idea that my readers are out there somewhere and that I just have to find them. Winning SPFBO would give me more reach. Honestly though, I’m grateful just to have been fast enough to make the initial cut.
What challenges did you face during the writing or publishing process, and how did you overcome them?
Oh boy. My goal had always been to traditionally publish. I wanted my books in stores, knew I sucked at self-promo, had no idea what I was doing in terms of the logistics of self-publishing (and still don’t in many ways). What I came to realize though was that self-pub has changed significantly since I was in my twenties, and that trad has changed along with it (there’s less marketing and editorial help allocated to authors, yet there’s more pressure to conform). A lot of my struggles have been internal ones related to getting over my attachment to the clout of traditional publishing and reckoning with the cynicism I see prevailing in the industry. As a queer, trans writer who isn’t interested in writing to formula, it’s been an uphill battle getting my work in front of agents and editors. Rejections were (and often still are) framed as, “this is ready to be published, but I’m passing,” or “I don’t know how to market this,” or “we already have another queer book.” Most recently, with my horror comedy featuring a neurodiverse protagonist, I’ve had a lot of rejections that have praised the voice, told me not to change it, but then called it too much in the next breath.
It feels like screaming into the void or repeatedly being hit in the face with heavy cookware.
I wouldn’t say I’ve overcome the anxiety all this has instilled in me (and which it instills in most querying writers, especially marginalized ones), but giving myself permission to self-publish has felt in many ways like reclaiming my creative and career agency. One thing that frustrates me most is that authors are constantly told agents aren’t gatekeepers but that they work for authors. Ostensibly, and ideally, this is true, but the system as it stands forces agents into the role of gatekeeper whether they like it or not, and because of the number of writers seeking agents, the employer-client relationship and associated power dynamics feel very much reversed. Matters aren’t helped by a shrinking publishing landscape and the dearth of speculative presses. I think we’re going to see even more writers turning to self-pub in the years to come.
Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
Someone recently shared a Facebook group called the Indie Cover Project with me. The group was an ENORMOUS help to me as a self-published author who is too poor to commission a proper artist. There are a lot of professional cover artists in the group who are extremely generous with their time and will offer critique, tips, and suggestions. Indie authors are also welcome to post blurbs and pitches for feedback.
If you’re interested in the business side of publishing, or just learning more about the industry, I would also recommend the Print Run podcast by literary agents Laura Zats and Eric Hane.
And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
oooo! I’m working on way too much.
My major current project is my queer horror comedy, The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle. I was very privileged to have this MS mentored by the eternally generous Mary Ann Marlowe in the #Queeryfest mentorship program. It’s basically Buzzfeed Unsolved/Ghost Files but queer and Canadian (very east coast!). The story follows one half of a cryptid-investigating Youtube duo as he travels to an isolated town in the wilderness following clues to the disappearance of his B-Movie bombshell mother who vanished when he was a child. He’s also fleeing his “straight” co-host whom he drunkenly made out with. When he discovers the town used to be a gay conversion camp and may currently be home to a cult, he’s forced to reckon with the monsters he swears aren’t real, alongside his own suppressed queerness and the parasocially obsessed stalker/fan who lured him to the town. In many ways, it’s the most personal story I’ve written, dealing with grief, queer pining, and narcissistic abuse.
I’m also about to start serializing the sequel to Ashtaroth (called The Crown of Asmodeus) on Patreon, Wattpad, Ao3, and my website. Once I’m finished posting it (in a few years . . . eep!), I’ll publish a print and eBook version like I did with Ashtaroth. I also have a lesbian Viking fantasy called Ash, Oak, and Thorn that was mentored by the lovely K. A. Doore in Pitchwars, and which I’ll self-pub once I’m done posting The Sands of Hazzan series (AOaT is technically a sequel and I want to avoid spoiling readers).
There’s also the aforementioned sci-fi, post-apocalyptic cathedral novel, Cathedral of Noise, and a historical fantasy about Late Antique Egyptian monastics banging each other and wrestling angels in the desert.
Academically, I recently had a chapter published in Vernon press’s volume Projecting Human: Representations of Disability in Science Fiction. My chapter looks at disability in the videogame series, Resident Evil. Upcoming non-fiction contributions include a chapter in Bloomsbury’s upcoming series on monsters in popular culture. I’ll be writing on what I’m calling “the fungal imaginary” in recent speculative media.
Apps that are based on artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGTP and Midjourney, along with apps aimed specifically at authors, have caused quite a stir. Do you expect these new technologies will make your life as a self-published author easier or harder, and do you expect that they’ll mean you’ll earn more or less?
AI terrifies me. So far it’s very much a way for large corporations to get away with devaluing, and replacing the labour of human beings. It’ll definitely make my life as an author harder (as it currently is for visual artists, audio narrators, and all kinds of creatives). Authors of all kinds owe it to stand in solidarity with visual and cover artists by saying no in any way we can to AI-use in our covers and illustrations. Major publishers in particular need to do more to spearhead this (looking at you, Tor!).
I won’t ever use AI in my writing, and I wouldn’t knowingly read or support work by an “author” who used it in theirs (except, of course, for use as critique in some way, but that’s not really how people are engaging with it).
Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
Most of my dreams are to do with writing/publishing. I still hold a steadily-dying candle for finding a dependable agent or editor who really gets my work and who I can collaborate with. There are great people out there, but it’s a crapshoot, so often, as to whether you find them or whether they’re in a position to offer. My main dream is that my work finds its readers. Quality of engagement means way more to me than quantity (though the more eyes on your work, the more likely you’ll reach the right readership). Of course, the pipe dream is to write full time, but most of us aren’t able to do that. Outside of writing, I’d love to continue to teach as an academic, researching and writing about monsters and marginality. Teaching is a real passion of mine, and something I’m increasingly willing to admit I’m very good at. Unfortunately, as with writing, academic work is very hard to find in the current climate, even when you have a stellar track record. I would also one day like to own a house and have a garden and to be able to be approved for a mortgage instead of sinking all my money into rent.
Oh! And the death of capitalism. That would be great too. Plus, you know, ending climate change, people actually recognizing marginalized rights (including animal rights). A certain anti-Semitic wizard Terf could maybe stop inspiring lawmakers to attack the group to which I belong, etc.
Anything else you would like to say before we close?
I would like to say a huge thank you to all the bloggers (like you!), the judges, Mark Lawrence, and all the wonderful readers working hard behind the scenes to promote indie and self-published authors. So often, it feels like our voices are being silenced even before we have a chance to speak, and this contest and initiatives like it help open a channel for more creatives to be heard.
It’s super important that we all support each other!
Thank you for some interesting answers, Steve. I wish you the very best in the SPFBO. I hope a lot of readers discover your writing. Thanks for doing the interview!
