Unlike many people, I’d never really harboured any long term ambitions of writing a book. I tended to subscribe to Christopher Hitchens’ idea that “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain”

Since starting work at university, however, I had become aware of the considerable benefits to language learning of extensive reading and had pushed hard for (and achieved) the adoption of extensive reading into some of the courses in my previous job.

My ex-coworker and I had talked several times about writing graded readers for our own library, but weren’t really sure where to begin. So, when the opportunity of the GRAPE (Graded Readers Authorship and Publication Experience) came up, we both felt that it was too good an opportunity to miss.

The GRAPE programme, organised by the JALT Materials Writers SIG, is a professional development initiative that supports participants in learning how to write and publish graded readers for language learners. Through workshops, mentoring, and feedback from experienced authors and editors, we were guided towards producing a book for the XReading extensive reading website.

My effort, a mystery story entitled “The Quiet Hero”, has just been published on the XReading website. It’s basically a mix of Detective Conan, Scooby-Doo and Star Wars, but let’s be honest, it’s mostly Scooby Doo.

Anyway, I am in the process of writing a more academic paper about my experiences that I will be sending off to a journal sometime soon.

In the meantime, please ask your students to read and review the book.