Secret Street is my novel for children.
So how do you get to secret worlds? Is it really all about crawling down rabbit holes, or walking through the back of wardrobes? That’s fine in theory, but what happens if you’re too big for rabbit holes, or you own a faulty wardrobe which is solid at the back? Paris Winsian is one of these people and she is determined to do something about it.
A little bit about the writing of Secret Street.
I set out to write the book for my daughter, as a straightforward fantasy story, where a young girl finds her way to a magical street. But I struggled with the sections set in the fantasy street. Then I got to thinking – we naturally assume that a place where you can fly around on broomsticks is more magical than a place where brooms are merely for sweeping floors. Yes that’s obviously true, but then again, while children picked out for magical education get to fly around on broomsticks, normal children live in a world where people can fly to the moon.
Maybe if you think about it like that, there might be just as much magic in the everyday world. I then asked myself, how could Paris go to a secret world but stay in this one? How could she find a magical realm that conceivably a reader of the book could actually discover for themselves? That’s where geology came in. I have always been fascinated by geology and fossils. The land beneath our feet tells stories of incredible lost realities. So, Paris became interested in geology, and after that I was able to write Secret Street.
Writing And So On 