At the time, I had no such plan, but a couple were published in magazines, and one made it to an anthology, ambitiously subtitled “The 100 Greatest Short Stories Ever Written”, 2 years after the editor, David Miller first read it on Twitter. Many people asked me if I was planning to publish them. I started to keep my stories, instead of letting them disappear. And little by little I began to understand that these pieces of ephemera – originally meant to be sent out on Twitter like seeds on the wind – were part of something larger a world of returning characters and interconnected storylines, fitting together organically, like a piece of honeycomb. Telling stories on Twitter feels much more like a live performance than a merely written one. One of the most interesting things about social media is how intimate it feels. There is a story the bees used to tell, which makes it hard to disbelieve. And I always began with the following phrase: I wrote them on trains in airports in response to current events and because they were fables and fairy tales, I wrote them in a rather particular language, using the character limitation imposed by Twitter to create a deliberately stylized and performative manner of storytelling, closer to the oral tradition than to the written form. Under the hashtag #Storytime, I would write them, live and from scratch, in front of a Twitter audience, whenever the spirit moved me, at odd moments during the day. I started to write these stories some years ago, on Twitter. This is at least in part because of its construction and because it was written in a completely different way to any of my other books, and via a different medium that of social media.
HONEYCOMB is a different project to anything else I’ve ever written.
On his journey through the Worlds of the Folk, of the Sand Riders, the Undersea, the River Dream and even the Kingdom of Death itself, he encounters a multitude of characters – a clockwork woman, a watchmaker’s boy, a huntress with a mechanical tiger, an undersea Queen in love with the Moon, a princess who dreams of a library – but none more magical than the bees, the little builders of honeycomb, taking their nectar of dreams to the hive, and spinning them into stories. Gorgeously Illustrated by Charles Vess, it follows the tale of the Lacewing King, magical trickster and ruler of the Silken Folk his misadventures, his treacheries and his pursuit through many Worlds by both the vengeful Spider Queen and the deadly Harlequin. Eerie, dark and opulent, cocooned in silk and shadows, this is a novel unlike any other: a honeycomb built from a hundred cells, each cell a story in its own right.
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