Jenifer Toksvig

adapted from Geraldine McCaughrean's novel
The Stones Are Hatching
by Jenifer Toksvig (book & lyrics)
and Alexander Rudd (music)

This is an ongoing project in which a single narrative story is exploded into a series of short stories, each able to stand independently of the whole as well as make their contribution to the central core.

Imagine watching a DVD you've never seen before, but instead of watching the movie the normal way, you go straight to the Scene Selection option and start watching the story somewhere in the middle. Then you jump to a part near the end, and then one near the beginning.

Eventually, you will have seen the whole movie, but your experience of the story will differ from other people's experience. Especially if they watched the scenes in their own choice of order.

(And you don't have to watch all of them, because each short story can stand alone. You could just watch a few. Just one, if that's all you want.)

The hope is that this web of short stories will form a core that can be expanded outwards. And it really would be a web, because the format needs a website in order to give the audience such power of choice (although it does also work on DVD). Hopefully, each individual story may spark other stories, that spark other stories, on and on.

These are new collaborations for other writers, artists, designers to engage with the storytelling and create their own contribution in any medium: film or photography, poetry or prose, pen or paint - however they tell stories.

These stories will be added to the core, to create one huge story that twists and winds its way in many directions, changing and growing as it is retold and told anew.

(For that's what stories do anyway, of their own accord.)

So pick a card, any card, by clicking on one of the small images on this page, and hatch the story in any way you please. For now, they're just descriptions, but soon they will be more...