I'm Valerie, a trans-woman who decided to write to explore what I've left behind, and what I've become.

I'm also Hugo, because I'm not ready to leave everything behind.

The Angels of the Ashes is about humanity after the loss of men and masculinity. This is not an anti-men fantasy, it is a slow horror of half of what humanity is being lost to us. On a personal level it's about the death of my male self, an exploration of how I feel about that. I still don't know. I may never fully know.

It's also an experiment, and maybe even a joke, playing on the old trope of Mars, or some other world having no men, only lusty warrior women or some other comical tropes from the golden age of sci-fi B-movies. I wanted to see if you could actually build a serious work off the back of this conceit. I guess I'll know when it's finished.