To be honest, the foxes may have started as a joke.
A few years back, I started writing a space opera novel called (at the time) Ninefox and Suicide Hawk. I later changed the submissions title to Ninefox Gambit—as one of my friends remarked, the original title sounded like it came out of a superhero comic—but the fox remained a central image. One of the characters, a tactician, was called the Immolation Fox and was an all-around devious bastard. This was partly in reaction to the foxwives of Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), a game I played and loved when I was younger, and later had the privilege of writing game fiction for. One thing always bothered me about the setting, however, which was that the foxwives of L5R managed to be cuddly. (Also unlucky.) And if there was one thing I remembered from the fox spirit stories of Korea, which have similarities to the Japanese version, it’s that fox spirits aren’t cuddly.
Naturally, I hypocritically started writing cuddly foxes myself. Maybe it comes from staring at cute fox photos on Tumblr. Maybe it’s the foxaganda.
As for the flash fairy tales, they started because I was looking to make quick cash. I wanted to buy a relatively inexpensive font, so I sold flash fiction at $6 a pop. It was a length I hadn’t previously experimented much with because it was such a hassle. At the time I started submitting, there didn’t seem to be many venues that accepted flash fiction, or paid for it either. I stuck to stories of 2,000 words and up. And even when markets did accept flash, I still had to go to the trouble of sending it in and waiting for a response, which might or might not be an acceptance, and then wait beyond that for the payment. With this setup, selling stories directly to people on reading my blogs on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, the deal was that I got paid in advance and the buyer got the story they got. I wasn’t sure if anyone would go for it—but people did. And furthermore, I discovered that I really enjoyed writing at this length, and that I could usually dash off a draft in a half-hour or less.
Flash fiction is interesting in that you can’t waste any words. It’s well-suited for jeweled imagery, and also well-suited for fairy tales or similar because you can evoke a great deal using archetypes. The fact that these were commissioned stories also meant that I deliberately wrote more upbeat stories than the usual. If you’re familiar with my longer work, a lot of which deals with war, you’ll know that “upbeat” isn’t how it’s usually described. But people don’t like downers, so I default to more cheerful (or at least, not outright sad) stories unless specifically requested. And a few of these I wrote for my own amusement, so there’s a little variation in tone.
There are four new stories in this collection for your enjoyment: “The River Soldier,” “The Stone-Hearted Soldier,” “The Witch and Her Lover,” and “The Rose and the Peacock.” No foxes in those stories, but foxes are tricky enough to maneuver around as it is. I hope there are enough of them in the rest of this collection to satisfy any vulpine-lover’s heart.