I was interested to read this blog post, using LITTLE BEE to provide some human background to the story about the US Senate’s decision not to pass the DREAM act, which the House passed in October.

One proposal of the DREAM act is that the children of illegal immigrants should have a potential pathway to citizenship. This interests me because such children are otherwise condemned to a life of illegality as a result of no choice that they have made, which poses an interesting moral question for the rest of society.

Something I try to do in my fiction is to take the time to explore the human consequences of political decision-making, which I think is something that the news media would generally like to do, but rarely has the time and resource to achieve.

I’m similarly attracted to the work of American writers such as Dave Eggers, Philipp Meyer, Adam Haslett and Cara Hoffman who are writing about people in the real world that political and economic forces are shaping.

Dear friends, I spent a good year writing a serious novel for adults, and I just felt like seeing the year out by writing a silly story to make my kids laugh. So here’s a short Christmas bed-time story for kids (age 3-to-8-ish). It’s called PEAS ON EARTH. Oh yeah.

I drew the pictures myself. That’s why the protagonists are peas. Peas are quite easy to draw.

You can download it here as a free e-book for your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Sony e-reader, or just to view on screen or print out. Do email it to friends with kids, re-post it, or whatever you need to do. Have fun, and a very happy Christmas!

Click here to download in PDF format (to view on screen or iPad or to print out)

Click here to download in EPUB format (for Sony e-Reader, iPad, iPhone)

Click here to download in MOBI format (for Kindle)

Thanks

Thanks to Bookswarm for helping me out with file formats & hosting. Thanks to @blackpooltower for testing the story on his kids. Thanks to @suziedoore and @BiscuitsBooks for encouragement and support as ever.

I’ve just discovered Orwell’s superb 1939 essay on Dickens, and can’t believe I’ve never read it before. The last section is reproduced below & gives a flavour of what to expect. The full text is here. In the main body of the essay, Orwell offers a clear-eyed analysis of Dickens’ shortcomings which serves to separate the chaff & identify what it was about the man that was great.

“Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

- “Charles Dickens” by George Orwell, 1939.