It's a little late for more Christmas cheer, but this is pretty cool. Chris Cleave, who I've mentioned here a few times and who wrote the excellent Incendiary andThe Other Hand, penned a Christmas tale. Peas on Earth is a little thing he wrote and illustrated himself to entertain his young kids and it presents the writer in a private light as a regular funny, silly dad - quite a departure from his novels. Cleave has published it as a free e-book on his blog so you can give your kids a laugh.
Storytelling in the 21st century... In my world the storybook - written in proper sentences, and on real paper with a texture you can stroke between your fingertips, with pictures that leap into your imagination - will never die. But technology has its place for the writer (think about your audience 'n all that). Here's a little digital Christmas for the multi-media gen. It's actually pretty cool. The Digital Story of the Nativity:
Thinking about the pet dog of one of my characters this morning led me to take a dip into Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. I read his tale about camels to kickstart my imagination. How did the camel get his hump? Then, how did the whale get his throat? And what was the sing-song of old man kangaroo? Kipling's answers are fantastical accounts that never lose their magic. The next book I picked up was the Literary Pocket Companion. It covers every kind of fact about literature you'd ever care to know, plus many more. I like to flip it open to a random page and start reading. The page I opened to today happened to tell an enlightening tale about the 400 camels of Abdul Kassem Ismael of Persia. "This tenth century scholarly Grand Vizier never left home without his personal library of 117,000 books, and to ensure any of his librarians could locate any book almost immediately, his camels were taught to walk in alphabetical order. "It all sheds new light on Rudyard Kipling's description of how the camel got his hump - because he spent his days saying 'humph'." I have never thought much about camels. But I have a new respect for them, knowing how hard Mr Ismael's camels humphed and puffed, lugging his beloved library back and forth across the desert. Amazon is flogging its new, super-duper 'wireless reading device' (with 360,000 books to download in a matter of seconds) across the globe this Christmas. They should have called it the Camel, not the Kindle.
and The Other Hand
, penned a Christmas tale. Peas on Earth is a little thing he wrote and illustrated himself to entertain his young kids and it presents the writer in a private light as a regular funny, silly dad - quite a departure from his novels.
