Talking to the World

We’ve just finished Art Attack which is an online story for Fiction Express. Fiction Express stories are read in classrooms all over the world from Argentina to Thailand. Art Attack is about a boy called Robbie who visits his great-aunt Stella in a care home. Aunt Stella is a sprightly 97-year-old inventor. She has developed three interactive paintings which her elderly friends can enter for an amazing adventure. Of course everything goes wrong and Robbie has to rush to the rescue.

Whenever we write for Fiction Express we write a chapter each week. Each chapter has three choices at the end and our readers vote for how they want the story to continue.

Here’s an example of the choices. Which special power does Robbie choose?

A) Super-speed

B) Super-bounce

C) Super-strength

We can’t start the next chapter until we get the result of the vote. It’s very exciting for us as we never know where our story is going to go.

Each week we and our readers contribute to a forum. Readers answer the questions that we pose and their best contributions are rewarded with a certificate. This is celebrated in a Zoom meeting when the book is finished. On Monday we were privileged and delighted to meet some of these readers online. It was a thrill to be talking to students from different countries across the world. They were able to ask us questions about our work and we were able to ask them about their experiences of Fiction Express.

Many congratulations to all the certificate winners!