Casey's And The Meek project

There is a large population of middle-school aged kids that read lower than their peers, and as a result of the material available to them, many give up on reading between the ages of 11-15 and never fully catch up to their peers. Given the critical social development during these ages, and the peer pressure that is a rite of passage to endure (or for many, succumb) it is not acceptable for an almost-teen to carry around a "See Spot Run" book - so they carry none, and read none, because of that social pressure. Their older, more perceptibly "mature" peers will carry teen novels or even -gasp!- adult age novels (It is easy to imagine that many teachers have confiscated ragged copies of the Shades of Grey series lately, especially in Texas).

   

My And the Meek project has been a long time in the making, but the first rewritten installment is nearing rough completion. Much of it has undergone a large re-write to address the low-ability high interest pre-teen factor. The sample paragraphs below have existed largely unchanged since 1998. Its aim, and the challenge, were to create a shorter series that interest both boys and girls, develops characters that pre-teens can find things in common with, demonstrate a few issues for commonality and mostly entertain readers. The entire series will be written at or below a 5th grade reading level, (which is three grade levels below the level that most things (newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc..) are written, with directed areas that peak above that for a very short period of time in an effort to get struggling readers to reach a little for understanding key critical areas.

The rewrite was mainly to convert a single longer adult novel into easily digested (for frustrated readers) 100 or less page pieces, but it was apparent that the antagonist would also need to be re-engineered because the original simply caused too much raw violence. The biggest challenge in the last six months has been to shorten sentences and paragraphs and to reduce larger vocabulary words for understanding. The sample below is at or around a grade 5 level. To compare, the blog post you just read was at about a "grade 16". 

Here are the first few paragraphs of  the first installment of  "And the Meek":

Abby’s olive skin had a pale look like the skin of a pear. She first saw her arm and she didn’t recognize it as her own at first – until it moved when she willed it to. Her head hurt and her belly was swollen and on fire. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she was unable to make enough spit to free it. She pulled it off, making the only sound in the day – a quiet ripping noise. Old tears crusted her cheeks and her pants were stiff and a little wet, either something from down there, or heavy sweat. She couldn’t smell anything as her nose was caked closed with snot. Abby found it hard to move at all. She was weak like when her mother told her she had the flu, only it felt like she had the flu forever without knowing it. For half an hour she lay on her bed, almost lifeless but gaining what strength she had from the consumption of muscles that had been drawn of energy for nearly two weeks.

She remembered being sick. Her whole family was sick. They knew it was coming because the TV told them it was. They all had the flu at the same time. Everyone was itchy at first, and then they got the flu. There was nobody to take care of the sick ones, they just yelled down the hallway for each other and it was hard to tell if they were yelling at each other or just yelling in their dreams. Abby was one of the first to get it– her Mother thought she had caught it at school. Her mother cared for her for the first two days, feeding her and giving her glasses of water in the red cups. Those were Abby’s favorites, the red plastic cups like they had in the restaurant downtown. Abby’s sister was really sick the next day, so sick that even though her dad was starting to feel yucky, he needed to take her to the hospital but there were so many people there, they had to wait. He stayed with her there, calling the house and telling their mother how Lisa was doing. The day after that, Dad was in the hospital too. He was throwing up blood like Lisa. That was all Abby remembered about being sick. Her mom was starting to feel bad, but Abby was too tired to take care of her and drifted in and out of sleep.

She had slept so long, all her arms and legs were asleep and her eyes hurt too, from lack of liquids. She tried to shake out her arms, like she did when she fell asleep on her arm downstairs in front of the TV and they got tingly. After a while the buzzing lessened and she could move both arms in her bed enough to pull her small body up to sit with her head against the headboard. The wetness down below was easy to see under the covers then. It was brown like a dried scab and the color scared her.

“Mom!” she called. Her own voice startled her in the quiet and made her ears jump. Her mom didn’t answer. She looked around the room; saw the bowl of soup she remembered was left for her when she was feeling too sick to eat. A goldfish bowl rested where it had always been, her dolly sitting beside it staring at her.

Comments? Suggestions? Send 'em my way!

- Casey