The Secret Corridor

My work as a professor for almost 20 years has been incredibly rewarding, but it has also taken me a very long way from the kind of literature that inspired my love of reading as a kid. 

A few years ago, while living in Georgia, just before Mia was born, I started a story. I can't say for sure how it began to form, but I do know there's something deeply magical about Georgia. Maybe I was inspired by the sweet smell of pine and fresh blooms in the backyard. 

Maybe the lightbulb moment happened as I was watching the fireflies flickering on and off in the dusky shade. 

Maybe it was always there, all along, born of a child's fascination with overgrown moonlit gardens, secret passageways in crumbling mansions, and stone staircases leading to mysterious places.

However it started, the idea started to grow. A book about magic, mystery, travel, and time. Something I would have wanted to read as a kid late into the night under the covers by flashlight.

Writing The Secret Corridor was wonderful fun. The book is about a young girl making her way through family secrets, time, and space, but at the heart of the story is a hard question: what if it were possible to create a better future by sealing off the past—permanently? This question sets in motion a daring operation by a magical rebel order, eventually making its way to a small, swampy town in Corridor County, where Mitch Scarlett lives.

Nearly five years after I started writing the story, a span of time that included the birth of my first child, a cross-country move, a new job, a global pandemic, and many other life-altering changes, I returned to the secret corridor and found myself wanting to stay.

Living in this world as adults, we give so many of our hours to the different kinds of work we do and responsibilities we assume. There is always so much to do in the day. But as I'm getting older, I'm realizing the importance of taking time for things that bring us imaginative joy.

Chapters of The Secret Corridor will be released every Friday to a new website I created for the project: CorridorCounty.com. You can also listen to the story as it unfolds by podcast at Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. I hope, if you decide to follow along, that you will feel the same enchantment I felt as a kid every time I started a new book in the fall.

~Nel~