Continuing their journey to lift Gideon’s curse, Willow and her fox companion have been tasked with escorting Princess Nuala to be wed to a prince from another kingdom. But despite Nuala’s hopes of making a joyful union, not all is what it seems between the prince and his betrothed. When his mistress, a barefoot woman without a tongue appears, the bonds of friendship between the two ladies grow, even as a storm brews on the horizon.
Fox & Willow Book 03: Blinded By the Light
With time running out to lift Gideon’s curse… Willow and her fox spirit companion find themselves in the port city of Tamiris, beneath the watchful eye of a smoking volcano.
Pang shared insight into the series:
Fox & Willow has been a very long-running work of the heart for both Aimo and me. We started it back in 2012 (although we’d been planning it for a little while before then, at least as a concept). When the two of us decided to work together, the idea was to start with something small—a one-shot, perhaps—but during the early stages the ideas grew a bit faster and larger than we anticipated, and Fox & Willow was born.
We both knew we wanted to do something with reworking fairy tales, but we weren’t entirely sure which ones. I have a very worn-out copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales that I had continuously read and reread growing up, so I was familiar with most of the common European tales and was looking to branch out a little into some Asian mythology and folktales. Aimo, being from Malaysia, wanted to explore more of the European tales! We compromised by retelling European fairy tales, but with Asian protagonists and varied settings.
I’m a panster by trade when I write, so I rarely outline anything, but for this I wanted to be very careful not to write us into a corner that we couldn’t undo, given that we’d be uploading as we went. With that in mind, we decided we wanted to do a different tale for each chapter that would have its own arc, but that the two main characters—Willow and Gideon—would also have an overreaching arc that spanned the whole story, with elements from each tale adding to their own development.
For the most part it’s been a very straightforward process. We pick the tales we want to cover—fairy tales, murder ballads, folklore, mythology—whatever combination we feel like using. I write a script and tweak it, and tweak it, and sometimes tweak it more as Aimo’s art makes it take shape, and I realize there’s a better way to indicate what we wanted to say. She does thumbnails each week of the various scenes/pages, and we modify from there—though to be honest, her interpretations are usually brilliant and usually don’t need much adjusting.
It’s less of a plan when we come up with each chapter’s concept, and more of a “what if?” What if the mermaid ran off with the princess in The Little Mermaid? What if Rapunzel had a literal tiger mom, and the tower was actually a volcanic mountain? What if Red Riding Hood was in a poly relationship with the woodsman AND the wolf?
In all such cases, we wanted to expand upon a narrative that was often overlooked in the original telling. Women characters in fairy tales are often written with limited agency, or as objects (e.g. prizes for wayward princes), lacking in the ability to change themselves or the world around them.
And while there may be myriad reasons for this, it’s the lack of detail that prevents us from really knowing who they are. Beyond the “what if” approach, the Fox & Willow tales are more about exploring the possibilities of those characters and the worlds they move through. But we wanted to try to do that organically, so that each piece flows in a natural rhythm with the story unfolding just as it needs to.
And, of course, there’s Willow and Gideon’s story. With each tale, a piece of their own history is revealed—their motivations and issues as they search for not only a way to release Gideon’s curse, but for a path toward rectifying the tatters of their relationship and understanding what it means to accept themselves for who they really are.
Fox & Willow can be purchased on the publisher’s website, where you can also preorder volume 3 before its September release.
