If you've visited the front page of English Raven any time recently, you may have noticed the logo featured above - and perhaps even followed the link through to the introductory preview page for World Adventure Kids!
This is a rather ambitious publication I am embarking on, and I thought it might be interesting to comment about its background and ongoing development here on my blog. Later, these posts could make for interesting reading!
The concept of World Adventure Kids! has been in my mind as a writer and teacher for at least 10 years. However, as a type of genre and style of reading, it goes back much farther even - to when I was about 10 or 11 years old. At that time, some friends and I were getting right into the Choose Your Own Adventure reader-oriented fiction stories, where - basically - the book is written in the 2nd person, talking directly to the reader as the main character in the story, who then makes the important decisions on how the narrative turns at given points and what outcome is achieved. While CYOA was cool, we thought the Fighting Fantasy books - written in the same fashion but within a fantasy world with additional game rules (and, of course, plenty of monsters and sword and sorcery style swashbuckling) - were THE coolest set of books possible!
These books were (and no doubt still are) powerful for young readers. Becoming the main star of the narrative makes a young reader feel like they are flying, and being able to control what happens (for either good or bad outcomes) represents a challenge that totally absorbs the reader. Now, later - as an educator - something important that occurs to me is that these books were read by both girls (who generally were ready to read anything) and boys who technically "hated reading" or weren't considered to be all that gifted in the classroom. We were so into these books that a couple of friends and I even wrote our own version of one, with each person exploring a different adventure direction, and all the entries pulled back together to make one interactive story with multiple adventure options and endings. The compilation and editing job fell to me. It took forever to put it all together, but the result was - well, seriously COOL!
The Choose Your Own adventure style books were enormously popular in the 1980s, and then suffered a catastrophic decline in the early 90s with the advent of video games. It now appears they are starting to make a serious comeback - something I wasn't actually aware of some 3-4 years ago when I embarked on putting something like World Adventure Kids together.
You may be wondering (quite rightly) why I would develop and go ahead with World Adventure Kids if the original CYOA series are being revamped and re-released. Well, my approach to this genre is somewhat different, in a variety of ways:
- I wanted to make something that reflected the nature of the world today, and the world today's children will face in the future, making things like technology, global issues and the environment key issues.
- My background is in ELT (English Language Teaching), and I wanted to make a series that doesn't just talk to English-speaking children in western countries, but children anywhere in the world (the emphasis on teamwork with characters from different nationalities is fundamental in World Adventure Kids; I won't say that the books are culturally neutral - but I will claim that I've tried to write books in a way that is culturally respectful).
- In combination with the EFL/ESL angle, I wanted to make a series of books written in a way that caters to children who may not be expert or patient readers - I might even go so far as to say I wanted adventures and a reading style that could be considered "remedial" - especially in terms of getting struggling readers going (and just as importantly - keep them going!).
Of course, I also wanted to write a series of books that I would enjoy writing and reading myself! The 10-year-old boy in me still wants to go on amazing adventures all over the world, meeting other kids and solving mysteries and problems. Writing commercial coursebook materials over the past 3-4 years has definitely shown me that it's not all that enjoyable all that much of the time. In spoiling myself, and going back to what feels like more genuine writing - writing from the heart, and with the spark of imagination - I might end up with some books that kids will really enjoy reading! Hopefully, in being selfish, I'm actually going to end up doing a better job overall and entertain more readers in the long run...
Occupied as I was with other work and writing projects (you know, the kind of stuff that might actually help pay the bills), I had to be content with just musing about this project for several years. When it came time to actually put something down on paper, I did - several times over a period of about one year, with an equal number of trips to the wastepaper basket. For some reason, it just wouldn't work.
At about this time, my 20-book coursebook series with Pearson Longman (Boost! Integrated Skills Series) was really starting to take off, not just in Asia but in several regions around the world. Suddenly I had a willing audience of major publishers ready to listen to my ideas about new publication ideas... Under some pressure from one of these publishers to get the idea down properly on paper, I finally sat down and wrote a whole double-adventure kit in about three nights - and this time, it didn't just work, it really worked!
As thrilled as I was with the final product, I re-read it yet again and realised that the ELT publishers I was being courted by probably wouldn't like it all that much. It was too innovative, too niche, not cookie-cutter enough, too sophistocated for the publishers to neatly package and sell with a big bang into an already highly competitive industry that was as cluttered with coursebooks and leveled readers as it was unwilling to ever try something genuinely new...
Still, the publishers wanted to see it, so I sent off my manuscripts and publication prospectus.
And... I was right! Despite ELT publishers telling me the concept and actual story were brilliant, fun, innovative, and definitely appealing to kids - it was too niche for their tastes, it couldn't be packaged up easily and sold as a coursebook series, it wouldn't be able to compete with the reading series already out there, etc. etc. I'll be fair to ELT publishers and concede that it's not easy for them to bring new innovations out into the market, and they are under enormous pressure to appeal to the company's bottom line and produce things that will sell well. I'll also be critical and say that new ideas and approaches don't often come out in teaching materials because major publishers - the entities best positioned and equipped to support such endeavours - won't try them. As one academic and coursebook writer said to me recently "no, they'll let some start-up go ahead and have all the ideas and take all the risks, and then they (the major publishers) will just copy them and claim it as their own new bandwagon..."
Well, I decided to take this as a sign and a direction rather than a cause for dejection. I decided to go ahead and produce World Adventure Kids! entirely on my own. I hired a fabulously talented illustrator named Declan Walsh, and got down to work. I created a careful level system and also an overall approach concept for this style of educational writing: IARA (Interactive Adventure Reading Approach), and then went over the storylines and text very carefully to make sure they provide an "even keel" for readers of different reading proficiencies and motivational interests. The results have been very exciting and now I even have a nice-looking preview page up on my site:
At this point, I am looking at both print and online versions of these reading materials, as the interactive nature of them works well with an online format. The first two adventure kits are going well, and will most likely be released in late October (this year) in online format, with print versions available not long after that.
I have to admit it is a little scary (there's a part of me that really wishes I'd done this sort of self-funded risk-taking adventure before I got married and had two children!), but it is also really exhilarating! World Adventure Kids are seriously cool, with really unique characters and action-packed Indiana-Jones-style adventures that address global issues. If nothing else, I know my own kids will have some fun and motivating things to read as they grow up! But more importantly, I am already proud of this work, irrespective of how well it does or how much money it makes me. I've added to my own education in terms of researching the themes, issues and contexts in the adventures, and had a lot of fun being a 10-year-old again...
To be continued!
:-)
