Behind the Story: Honeybee · 8:48pm Jul 16th, 2022
This story was very difficult to write.
Not a bad story by any means, but it was certainly a unique story and I’m excited to discuss it.
But this story is one of my first song stories in a good long while, so I suppose I have to explain that first.
The beginning of this story goes all the way back to June. So, I’m part of a server that holds routine music nights, and I declared that for June, I was only going to play songs by LGBT+ artists or bands containing LGBT+ members.
But I couldn’t just play Queen songs all month, so I decided to reach back into my memory to try and discover a new artist or two. One of those artists I remembered hearing about from the whole Dashcon debacle was Steam Powered Giraffe.
I knew who Steam Powered Giraffe were, and I knew that one of the members was trans (Isabella “Bunny” Bennett). However, I hadn’t gotten around to listening them even though they sounded really cool.
For those unaware of who Steam Powered Giraffe, or SPG, is, they are a Novelty/Performance band based in Southern California. Their gimmick is that they’re all Victorian-era robots who are outfitted to sing. Currently, the members consist of David Michael Bennett (as The Spine), Isabella “Bunny” Bennett (as Rabbit), and Bryan Barbarin (as Zer0). I decided to listen to all their music because I’d been meaning to, and they’ve quickly become one of my favorite bands.
With all that out of the way, it’s time to hone in on what exactly SPG contributed to Honeybee.
Off of SPG’s second album, The 2¢ Show, comes their most famous song. The song is titled Honeybee.
The song can mean a lot of things, personally my preferred interpretation is that the song is about someone you dearly loved once but have since lost. A sort of resigned sadness, happy that it happened, but sad that it’s over.
It also hits incredibly hard once you’ve actually experienced those things.
So, I was just replaying Honeybee in my head one night to help me go to sleep (it’s a fantastic song, but it does have a lullaby quality to it), and then I suddenly realized that I could make a story out of this. This was in late June, as I’ve been working on this story for some time.
So, I quickly ran to my notes app, and wrote out my spur of the moment idea. The idea was to make an OC story based on the lines, “Hello, goodbye, it was nice to know you/how I found myself without you/that I’ll never know”. That’s the sort of idea I only write down because it sounds cool, but I suddenly remembered Felicity, and realized that I had the story right there.
Now, Felicity is alive (as far as I know), but at the time I thought of this story, it was completely unknown whether or not she was. So, I decided to write a story in the same universe as Raining., which was chosen as such because it was a deeply personal story and that’s what Raining. was originally made for.
Honeybee was originally thought of as Felicity, but the character grew into her own unique form. This is why the deadname was chosen to be Duke, because Felicity had mentioned on one occasion that a name she was thinking of making her OC was “Dane”, so then I had a naming scheme, Duke and Dame.
Rose is meant to be me, but the half of me that isn’t Reinn’s personality. It’s complicated. Reinn is based on my AD/HD, my tendency to go on tangents, and my hobbies. Meanwhile, Rose is based around my desire to try my best (unimpeded by the AD/HD ‘not interesting enough’ curse), and my want to help people.
So, I had a story idea. Now I just had to write it.
Originally, Honeybee was one chapter, but I wanted to make it experimental in some way, so I completely changed up my writing style. That was a carryover into the final version, which is written very differently than most of my other things.
But I thought that wasn’t enough. So I decided to conclude each segment with a line from the song, reinforcing the feelings of Rose and Honeybee. But that was clunky, so I decided that I was just going to make 4 different chapters with the lines as the chapter title with the author’s note. However, this did run into a minor problem when I came to the line “You didn’t have to offer your hand/since you kissed it, I am at your command” and ponies don’t have hands, so I had to write my own lines for that part.
It was always meant to be a trans story given what moment of my life it was based on, so the chapters progress chronologically. Honeybee’s experiences mimic Rose’s (as seen in Raining.), but Honeybee is a lot more uncertain about the entire thing and her parents are much more controlling than Rose’s ever were.
Originally, Honeybee didn’t run away, it was implied she did something worse, but after that ending was written and rewritten a couple times I realized that A: Felicity wasn’t actually dead, so that wouldn’t work and B: I cannot trust myself to write that for the life of me with my complete and total lack of prereaders.
I didn’t actually have to change too much, but I added the 5th chapter to at least be somewhat reassuring that Honeybee is still alive, but nopony knows where.
The story didn’t really have any additional things worked in, though the ‘school’ was envisioned as being a metaphor for the internet, but I couldn’t do that with a single story. The world’s going to have to fill up more in order for that to become standard (and I think I just got an idea regarding Rose).
It was actually a pretty simple story, all things considered, but what really made it hard was writing completely out of my style. It probably didn’t help that I discovered anime in the process, meaning I had to fight against myself in order not to implement those influences into the narration, because my brain is always set on whatever media I’m currently consuming a lot of. But, I got it done without too much tone variation.
Aside from the usual and the obvious, influences for this story likely were derived from Bicyclette of all people (Trepidation specifically), with her very descriptive and somewhat repetitive style. There might be a little MushroomPone in the DNA, too.
That’s really all there is to talk about regarding Honeybee.
And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
Additional information I forgot to mention: I had cover art for this story, but I thought it looked bad, so I typed in ‘Honeybee background’ in Dall•E Mini and decided that I liked that more, so it got used.