Martin Cahill is joining us today to talk about his novel, Audition for the Fox. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
What’s Martin’s favorite bit?
Like any writer who appears here, I have multiple places I could pull from that I love within my debut book, Audition For The Fox. Conversations, worldbuilding, characters, images, and more. But the one I want to highlight is instead, a Clay and Cloud tale, a story within our story. You see, the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven, the gods of this story, used all sorts of material in the shaping of the world. And with the leftover clay of the earth and cloud of the sky, they shaped mortal beings to live in the world the made; why is a reason to be revealed within the text. But it was so, ever after, stories between Pillars, between gods and mortals, those that taught morals and lessons down through the ages, were known as Clay and Cloud tales.
Akin to a fable of Aesop or a story pulled from the mind of Scheherazade and her many nights, I found that when I was turning this into a longer work, I had more room to play with. And I wanted to play! I wanted to add texture to this world and animal gods and the domains they upheld. I wanted to add context to the daily lives of mortals and the sort of stories they grew up hearing. And mostly, I wanted to explore the character of T’sidaan, Fox of Tricks, in a way they would appreciate; with some whimsy, a wink to the reader, but also say something real about not just them as an entity, but them as a god. What is the point of a trickster, anyway?
Reader, they taught me much. And the Clay and Cloud tales were some of my favorite to write as I got to know T’sidaan better.
But my favorite is the one where I think I got them just right. The Fox and the Turtle.
One of the first written, but the last one published in the book, I started writing this to see if I could get at the heart of the Fox. Writing a character so inherently chaotic with such a no-fucks-given attitude can be tough; finding a balance for them is crucial. And if the Fox was going to succeed as a character, they had to give a fuck, at least a little. They couldn’t be totally capricious. And in the exploration of a trickster god’s purpose, with examples of characters and stories churning in my mind all the while, I tasked myself with this: what makes my trickster a god to be loved and worshipped? And what makes my trickster a being that hasn’t been totally kicked out of the Divine Family because of sheer annoyance?
I was able to answer it in the Fox and the Turtle.
It’s my favorite bit because it has bit of everything: it’s funny, it’s jovial, it’s a little silly, it’s a little serious, it has some fun imagery and writing, and it shows the Fox being a little scamp at their finest, while also not becoming an absolute chaos monster. And at the end of the day, there is a lesson learned by the Turtle about the Fox, and about how those the Fox keeps close move through the world. I won’t spoil it here, but as I wrote it, I smiled to know I had found it: the heart of my Fox.
It would go on to inspire the other Clay and Cloud tales, and the thesis itself would appear again and again as the story continued on.
I’m excited for you all to read Audition For The Fox, and I hope, after reading of Nesi’s journey and her time with T’sidaan, when you reach the moral of the Fox and the Turtle, you will not only laugh, but you will smile.
I hope you smile to see the driving force at the heart of my trickster.
And I hope you will feel a similar way, too.
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BIO:
Martin Cahill has published short fiction in venues including Fireside, Reactor, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Nightmare. Cahill’s stories “The Fifth Horseman” and “Godmeat” were respectively nominated for the Ignyte Award and included in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut and a contributor to Critical Role: Vox Machina – Stories Untold. Cahill lives in New York. Visit him on the web at https://martintcahill.wordpress.com/.