Excellent question! Probably not a question I should answer when I’m drinking because I don’t know how much sense this is going to make.

The TL;DR response is :::: I am going to temporarily disable Asks in 2016 because my sanity honestly demands it. Key word is temporarily, because if things go how I need them to, I’ll be able to open Fox Asks sometime in spring.

The too-long rambling response is ::::

The Foxes have been a part of my life for 17-odd years. This is not the oldest story I have, but it is the most dangerous, because it is an all-consuming force of nature. The Foxes have seen me through the best times of my life; they have seen me through the absolute worst. They are everything I am, and everything that means anything to me. They are stepping off the plane in Nagoya and Osaka and Tokyo – they are Kuwait and the sick taste of beer and an ice cold linoleum floor in Florida. They are as toxic as they are important, and if I do not learn to let go of them I will never let anything else in.

Publishing The Foxhole Court was a major step for me, because it meant I’d finally found a version of the story I was happy with, that I’d finally found a draft I could let go of. And it’s so, so, so exciting, and so amazing, and so – impossible?? – that people are reading it, that people want to recommend it, that people are talking about it to each other and to me and????? how?? how did we come to this, what did I do to deserve this, why did you guys even—???

Sometimes I can’t believe we’ve come to this point, where anyone else besides me could give an honest shit about these shattered kids and their second chances. Because honestly, this was all I wanted all along, was for someone, just one person even, to take a chance on such a ridiculous plot. To believe in Neil and his dreams, and to care whether or not he made it in the end.

I love the support the stories are getting. I love the Asks, the tags, the conversations. The angry flailing & the what the actual fuck Nora & the What is the Foxhole Court questions. They are the light of my life, they are beyond my wildest dreams. But they are also coming at a point where I am finally learning to let go, to be more than this story, to be more than these children and their pain and their betrayals.

I need to know that I am more than this, that I can write more than this, and the only way to do that is to close the door. Asks give me an excuse to linger, to keep the Foxes close at hand, to keep tipping over that edge and hanging on tight when what I really need is to learn to compartmentalize them into something less all-consuming.

I just need a little time. I just need a little room to sort myself out, to flush the Foxes out my system – not entirely, because I’ll never be able to let go of them completely, but I need them to be a little less overwhelming. Once I gain traction on another story, once I learn how to feel again, how to write again, I’ll risk letting the Foxes back in.

Just  –  if you can forgive me, and tolerate me, just give me a little time to rediscover myself without them in my head, and I’ll be more than happy to reopen Asks.