Another thread that I forgot to mention in the April update is that of creating our own materials that we can then write and test within the group. Nothing in the TPRS world, for example, comes even close to the story scripts written and tested for years now by our own Anne Matava and Jim Tripp and that many of us use, and without which personally I would be lost – I actually cling to Matava scripts in my storyasking classes. Of course, Bryce has been producing some of the best Spanish stuff out there for years now.
Come to find out this year that Robert also produces lots of materials and has already created good stuff for his upper level German classes and is now working at creating level 1 stuff for German, which can then possibly (hopefully) be translated into other languages. All that is expanding now, with Robert’s focus on novels, not story scripts. (I have always wanted to use the phrase “come to find out”, by the way, and there I have. It’s just a good day all around what stuff like that happens.)
Anyway, I love this. We are creating our own materials for obvious reasons, that many of us don’t really resonate with a lot of the party line stuff that is out there and seems to have been out there forever, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And I think that there are others in our group who are doing what Robert is doing. So let’s just keep the lines of communication open and help each other in this not so easy work of creating new and high quality materials that will put us out of our novel misery.
This blog post is almost a call for papers, as it were, but without a symposium target date – rather it is more like a kind of ongoing group project. When you have created something and you are ready to share it with the group, just send it to me and I will post it, those of us who wish can test it, we have ample first class translators, and over time we will get good stuff from those efforts.
I even have created a category for novels, with Nordseepirats being the only one in there, but it’s a start. There are no limits to the amount of novels we can put in that category – I think that is really cool how big the storage space is on the internet and I appreciate Al Gore very much for inventing it.
Anyway I understand that Robert is on a roll and we will get to read more of Nordseepirats in short order here over the next week or two. And I know that Brigitte and Martin are involved in translation and proofing and such. Martin’s fluency in French as well as in English and of course his native German has the potential to be of great help here, if he has time.
The big need right now is an ultra simple level 1 reader with a vocabulary of under 250 words. That is what I think we need most, more beginning novels that command interest and yet have easy to follow plots. Such a thing currently doesn’t exist, actually. Robert’s German 1 stuff is in very nascent form right now, I believe, and we may have to wait on that, but it is clear that Nordseepirats has already proven itself to be a strong level 2 text.
Anyway, that’s the update on how those of us who want to should keep our attention on the production of our own own materials and field test them here and let all that evolve as it will as a series of group threads. So if anyone in the group is writing your own stuff, keep us in mind and we can get some willing testing of your work right here in the way Robert has done, with translations if they get a life of their own and people start using them.
In terms of talent, if our group was a basketball team, we’d be Kentucky.