Hello! As an SPFBO entrant myself, I am hosting spotlights for other authors in the 9nth annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. Today, The Wings of Ashtaroth is in the spotlight, by Steve – who, among other things, has a love for spiders.
The Wings of Ashtaroth
The great city of Qemassen is at a crossroads. A powerful empire from beyond the ocean threatens to reignite a centuries-old feud. A slave rebellion brews in the tangled labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city streets. And Crown Prince Ashtaroth, the city’s supposed saviour, is considered unfit to rule even by those closest to him.
When the high priest burns one of the royal children alive as a desperate offering to the city’s absentee gods, it destroys the fragile peace within Qemassen’s scheming first family. Seeking revenge for the death of her child, Ashtaroth’s mother calls on a powerful demon named Lilit.
But Lilit cannot be trusted. Her cruel machinations pit brother against sister and father against daughter, laying waste to Ashtaroth’s family. Then Lilit approaches Ashtaroth with a demonic pact of his own-one that could save his people and his home. But between war from without and a revolution erupting within, even a demon may not be enough to keep Qemassen standing.
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.
Sounds like the set-up for a harsh world and a harsh story,
Let’s find out more in the Questions!
As a Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) Entrant, you’re not just independently published, but self-published. Can you start by explaining a bit about why you chose that route and how it’s been for you?
The short answer is that my entry, The Wings of Ashtaroth, is far too long for a debut fantasy in the traditional market. So many of the edits the early MS needed involved adding material and fleshing out storylines rather than cutting (fairly rare, I think), and so serializing and then self-publishing the book made a lot more sense than attempting to query it more than I already had.
I’ve been serially posting chapters from Ashtaroth for about three years now and only just put out the eBook. So far it’s going really well, though I admit I don’t have anything to compare the process with in terms of numbers of downloads/sales. What I can definitively say is that the self-publishing and #SPFBO communities have made the process so welcoming and fun. I feel like I’ve already made some new friends and I’ve definitely found some cool new books to gush about.
That is awesome! And I think you’re not alone in having a book that would’ve suffered from being cut – or even ceased to be a book at all! 😀
On a related note, why did you enter the SPFBO contest? How do you expect to find it? Refreshing your blog’s page every five minutes, or sit back and chill?
I have OCD and a tendency toward anxiety, so I’m 100% the refreshing type. That said, it’s been surprisingly easy not to hyperfixate on the judges’ blogs (partly because the ones I was assigned to haven’t posted about the contest as of me answering this interview). I think the bigger piece of why I’ve been able to keep my mind on other elements of the contest (socializing, reading, and learning from other authors) is that as I said above, it’s such a welcoming and generous group of people.
Entering #SPFBO was something I’d wanted and planned to do since I started serializing Ashtaroth. I was so excited to put my book out there and get an opportunity to reach more readers. The validation of finding people who enjoy your work is invaluable, but it certainly can’t be the only reason you come to a contest like this or (in my opinion) you’re liable to come away disappointed.
I’ve been in previous competitions (specifically, mentorship programs whose goal was to help authors find literary agents), and while I never got an agent or publishing deal out of those programs, what I did gain was a supportive community and a better understanding of craft and marketing. Because of my experiences in those contests (including the initial disappointment and sense of failure associated with not “winning” at finding representation), I think I have pretty realistic/low expectations with regard to my book moving forward as a judges’ pick, but high expectations in terms of community-building.
That is nice you have that experience! I hope that, despite some of the drama, your expectations in community-building are met … for yourself and others!
Book titles. Why did you choose the title, The Wings of Ashtaroth?
The Wings of Ashtaroth has, no joke, been the title of this book since I first conceived of it in junior high (about 20 years ago). The idea back then was to write a series of books that all featured the names of demons (mostly grabbed from The Lesser Key of Solomon).
When I finally started working on Ashtaroth as an adult in my twenties (I’m now 37), the demonic aspect of the books became much less of a focus, but the title still works for this one. There’s a resonance the title has in terms of the book’s plot and its main character (who is named Ashtaroth), but beyond that I wanted the titles to indicate in a kind of metatextual way some of the thematics at work in each volume.
The upcoming sequel, The Crown of Asmodeus, is probably a better example of this. The demon Asmodeus is a literal character in the series, a fictional legendary figure in the series, and also a real-world mythological character who has his own symbolic meaning (generally he’s associated with lust, but within the books there’s a specific character who gets associated with Asmodeus/Ashmodai allegorically). So, there’s a lot of intentional layering in terms of what the phrase “crown of Asmodeus” means. It refers at once to the individual who is king at the start of Book 2 and his propensity for decadence, a separate character in the series whose legacy informs the whole series, as well as the nature of kingship/power as something inherently corrupting.
Ooh, that sounds like an interesting combination of things tied together neatly! I do so like cool titles!
I won’t ask for your favourite scene since I know some people don’t have those (like me; I never have favourites), but can you share a (non-spoiler) scene you really like and you just can’t believe how awesome it is every time you go back to re-read it? Alternately, you can share something about a character you really like. Or both, if you want.
Oh! There’s a spoilery scene I so want to share for this, but I’ll hold off. As a writer, I tend to vacillate wildly between a complete lack of confidence in my abilities and wild over-confidence, so I was very excited that on a re-read of this one very intense battle scene (not my forte), that the chapter really held up. On a future re-read though, it’s very possible I’ll decide the opposite. D : For anyone who reads the novel and wants to know what one, “Zimrida” should be enough to indicate what I’m talking about.
Instead, I’ll share the following excerpt from my book! It’s mostly a speech by one of the central characters:
“Call myself lowborn.” He chewed on the words as he stared outside, like he might spit them at her feet. He didn’t deign to look at her. “When I was a child, I had a sister. I had several sisters and several brothers too, but I was closest with my little sister, Safeva. When they came of age, my mother whored them on the corner of the Qelebet, while my brothers picked pockets and swindled fools on the tiles of the Eghri eq-Shalem. It was a gamble for Safeva and I, which fate our mother would choose for us: the corner or the knife. We were so alike, though there was a year between us, and if she had wanted, I’m certain my mother could have sold the pair of us to Ashtet’s temple to be trained in her arts. My mother preferred a dependable income. She would grow our hair long until there was enough to sell, and then she would cut it. My sister’s companions whispered that it would be the corner for us both, and I lived in dread of it until the day the temple took me.”
Uta remained still in her chair, watching the rise and fall of Samelqo’s shoulder blades beneath his fine azure robe. “Your parents made more from selling you to your heq-Ashqen than as a whore.”
Samelqo stirred at that, but he didn’t turn from the window and the midnight blue sky that hung above the city. “I doubt it,” he said. “Earlier I told you I was disappointed in the change in myself.” He paused. “We like to believe that proximity to greatness is enough, that the wealth and beauty and power of the gods is transferable to those who brush shoulders with nobility. As a child I was so committed to that fantasy that I would stare for hours at the beautiful things in the Eghri: fabrics in colours so rich it seemed a goddess must have dipped her toes into the dyeing vat, spices so costly a grain was worth more than my entire family, hair cut from the heads of pauper children that if we had asked to purchase it for ourselves would have meant a week or more without food.” He chuckled bitterly. “Visitors to the bedrooms of my sisters and mother were always telling me how beautiful I was, how regal, and I came to believe that I must be owed the beautiful things that others traded so easily. How much better would the world become were I only to be dressed to match the princely face I believed I possessed. I sat in the dust, baking in my envy, watching uglier men and women paw at the fine clothes I coveted. I didn’t think myself childish, but it was a childish craving, of an intensity very few but children feel. I can still picture the fine gold silk I asked my sister to help me steal that day. I can’t remember the details of her face, but I remember the cloth and the unabashed want that stirred me. She was anxious to be taught to pickpocket—to play the knife game, as we called it—and I used her eagerness to convince her to help me.”
Samelqo paused, a subtle hitch in his voice, a slight tremble in his shoulder that eyes less keen than Uta’s wouldn’t have recognized.
“She was caught,” he continued. “A Yirada officer with something to prove, or perhaps simply violence in his heart, decided to take her arm. I was dragged to the Yirada cells, while our friend Dannae raced home to alert my parents. I thought Safeva was dead. But the heq-Ashqen of Tanata and the heq-Ashqen of Molot had seen it all. They paid at great expense for my sister to be cared for. She survived, thanks to their charity, and I was given to Tanata’s temple as payment. I should have learned better, all that time ago, that no matter what title I bore, no matter how costly the robe or how wealthy the eye that hungered for me as I had hungered for that cloth, none of it would change me. The Semassenqa possess a worthiness that is untouchable and incorruptible. Like diamond, it does not flake. Only mortal flowers fade.”
Uta’s back ached, twisted as she was in her seat to watch him. Even though he seemed finished, he didn’t turn. She didn’t know what to say, not because she was moved to some great pity, but almost because his story left her oddly cold. It was sad, she recognized that, but so were the stories of every slave Uta had grown to adulthood with in the Hamatri. And she knew, whatever he said, that it wasn’t childish to want in the way he described. It was a hope and it was a dream, and no matter how he believed he hadn’t been changed by his fate, he stood here, the most powerful man in Qemassen, surrounded by luxury. If Samelqo eq-Milqar wasn’t one of the Semassenqa, who else could lay claim to the title?
That is a biting excerpt. Thank you for being so generous with us! — And I do relate to have such different feelings towards my own writing in different moods!
What are some elements or themes, or combinations thereof, that really make your book stand out to you?
I love talking theme! It’s such an underdiscussed aspect of reading and writing in online discourse.
Ashtaroth is a political fantasy and you’ll find a lot of common sub-genre themes inside its pages (ones related to power, for example; or that war = bad). Outside of what might be the obvious, themes of sacrifice, Otherness, and the cyclical nature of abuse are pretty key to the story.
There’s a lot of literal, on-page sacrifice that takes place in the context of religious ritual and one of the more drastic and painful iterations of this sets the events of the rest of the book in motion. Outside of a religious context, however, there’s also a secondary level at which sacrifice becomes not just a motif but a theme. A variety of characters in the novel perform acts of sacrifice (sacrificing personal freedom, for example, or one’s reputation, or one’s own body) in service to something they believe is greater than themself. I try, as the author, to avoid any definitive answer as to whether these sacrifices are noble or in any way “worth it” (or even selfish in some cases). I’m more interested in presenting scenarios and questions than in attempting answers.
Alongside sacrifice, I’m very interested in exploring themes of trauma related to abuse, and Ashtaroth depicts and deliberately attempts to contrast the experiences of a variety of characters caught inside abusive cycles. I should warn that you won’t find many ideal survivors in the book. The characters impacted by these cycles and who are entangled, sometimes, in generational traumas, often don’t behave the way we would like them to. Some of the characters find themselves very much unable to break free of their abusive circumstances and continue to feel love and loyalty toward the ones who’ve hurt them, while others turn their pain outward and hurt others. Since the story takes place in a historically-based classical world in which PTSD and CPTSD aren’t recognized concepts, when the characters attempt to reckon with their experiences it’s inside a framework that we may not fully understand. They’re also often operating in the context of systems of power that rather than giving them tools to escape trauma, in fact compound it.
There’s one character, for example, who is a slave captured by my Rome-analogue country but who, rather than detesting the nation that enslaved his people, very much projects the anger we perhaps think he ought to feel onto other marginalized persons he encounters. When we meet him in the novel, he very much identifies with the oppressor, but I feel comfortable in saying that this is a trauma response to an abusive system. Being viewed as Other in the context of the story is therefore intertwined with these abusive and oppressive systems of power, and there are multiple characters reckoning with internalized hatred toward groups of which they are a part. As a trans person, I have a personal stake and interest in exploring these kinds of complex dynamics and systems and most of my POV characters are in one way or another Others or outsiders within their own communities.
Thank you for sharing this! I find these attempts to explore human nature and responses – without judging too much from outside – to be fascinating!
What would you like to share? Take this in any direction you feel is relevant!
This is such a great question and opportunity, but I’m suddenly blanking on anything worthwhile that I could say.
I suppose one thing I could talk about, as a queer author, is the role queerness plays in Ashtaroth. I’ll try to keep it short and sweet, since I have a longer piece that’ll be coming out about this in the months to come.
As a queer writer, it’s important to me to mirror the diversity I see in real life inside the pages of whatever I write. Ashtaroth is perhaps not what you’d expect from something marketed (to some degree) as a “queer book.” It’s very light on romance (though romances do occur and significantly impact plot), and the queer characters in its pages both do bad things and have bad things done to them. Often I find there’s this expectation placed on queer writers (and marginalized writers of all kinds) to either make “shippability” or romance the central plot or vibe of their work, or to essentially produce trauma-porn or issues books that are targeted toward the non-marginalized reader. Both of these approaches, of course, have value and a place, but I dislike that pressure is placed upon marginalized artists to only create work that fits into one of these two categories. Ashtaroth is an outlier in that it tells queer stories, is written by a queer author, but doesn’t really fit either of these trends (at least not in an obvious or exclusive sense). The queerness that’s on-page is mostly incidental in the sense that I wrote the players as people first, with their queerness as a component of their experiences of personhood, but not the deciding factor in terms of personality/moral correctness/significance to plot. In a lot of cases, the characters also don’t express their queerness in ways that entirely match real-world concepts. The country in which most of the story takes place, for example, does have a concept somewhat analogous to transness, but it only really recognizes trans women (this is mostly because identifying as female removes individuals in this culture from positions of power, whereas AFAB people identifying as male would represent a means to acquire greater power for a population who are already limited). Basically, they’re fine taking people’s “power points” away, but aren’t exactly happy to hand them out. This doesn’t mean trans men don’t exist of course, but that there’s not a vocabulary for it within the culture. Similarly, it doesn’t mean that the trans women in the story have it easy or are privileged in any way. One of trans women in the story, for example, has basically given up any attempt to identify as female, because to do so would have meant relinquishing her political power and, more significantly for her family, failing as her family’s heir.
As a historian and academic, one thing I did want to problematize was this notion we as modern people tend to have that historical queerness was either non-existent or identical to how we understand it now. Concepts like homosexuality and heterosexuality didn’t exist until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cis and trans identities were very much imbricated with this binary into the twentieth (yes, that’s right, the concept of “straight” was also an invention!). That said, people to whom we might apply these terms have always existed. However, when we look at the treatment of historical queer people in their own times, many of us would probably be surprised by the reality of what that looked like. In many ancient cultures, for example, a man performing the penetrative role during a sex act would not have been viewed with suspicion, whereas being penetrated as a man had a lot of negative implications since in a misogynistic environment it was equated with “playing the woman.” There are many more such potentially surprising facts that trouble an easy reading of the past as hostile toward queer people: gender play during carnivalesque religious festivals is fairly universal, even if it was occasionally outlawed or legally circumscribed in some contexts; in Hellenistic Egypt, women could and did marry each other; and the most potent of Norse magic was the purview of both gender-transgressive and femme men as well as powerful women.
I wanted to imbue Ashtaroth with the richness of these oft-forgotten queer histories, while allowing the characters to be something beyond cardboard cutouts that would meet some nebulous criterion for “good representation.”
Thank you for sharing this! I love stories where romance (and also sexual identity) is not the primary thing about relationships or characters – and I also like seeing people acknowledge that modern terms, labels, and categories are not universal, and work with that!
I hope you had fun with these! 😀
Steve is a trans author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (basically, if it’s weird he writes it).
He grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and currently lives and works in (the slightly less eldritch) Montreal. He holds advanced degrees in Russian Literature, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies. His current academic work focuses on marginalized reclamations of monstrous figures. He teaches the History of Satan and Religion and its Monsters.
In 2018, Steve’s lesbian Viking novel, Ash, Oak, and Thorn, was selected for the Pitch Wars mentoring program and agent showcase. During Pitch Wars, Steve was lucky to receive mentorship from fellow queer author, K. A. Doore.
His queer horror comedy, The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle, was mentored by Mary Ann Marlowe in the inaugural #Queerfest class.
Steve is passionate about queer representation, Late Antiquity, and spiders.
You can find Steve on his Website or Twitter.
You can pick up his SPFBO 9 entry, The Wings of Ashtaroth, from most retailers here or download it for free. You can also check it out on Goodreads.
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