Lydia Collins (pen name: Riley Cross), a patient English teacher at Piscataway High School, loving mother and wife is also…an undercover publisher?

Ms. Collins recently published The Swamp of Doom, a fantasy and thrill-filled children’s book. It is about a young girl named Blip who tries to rescue her aunt, survive a radioactive swamp (of doom), and regain courage in herself despite her many misfortunes. Ms. Collins described this book as “a crossover between Coraline and the Addams family with a dash of shadowy humor and allusions to Arthurian legends.”

Finding inspiration from her own kids, she explained that each of her children created their own characters in the story, and she discussed the characters with them nightly.

“I loved hearing their insight into the story.” She said, “That’s the power of a story…messages that matter should be shared!”.

On the topic of kids, how was Ms. Collins able to manage all this writing when she has so much to already take care of? Her kids and their well-being, her school students and their grades?

“It’s always difficult to balance time,” she admitted. “But sometimes life is more about chaos than balance.” She then elaborated, “By chaos, I mean that art is rarely achieved at the perfect time or in the perfect way.

It had taken over a year to write, edit, and work with the publisher to get the book to its final form.

Collins said, “For this project, I mapped out the chapters and spent a lot of late summer nights (and days) typing away!”.

At times of hard struggle, which she claimed would be “writing the last chapter, editing in time to meet the publisher’s deadlines”, Collins would simply remind herself of the real purpose of her writing this book: “I wanted readers to remember that we are all so much more than the sum of our bad days….I wanted to make [readers] smile, laugh, and cry just a little bit so that life’s problems feel just that much less.”

This isn’t the only book the mysterious teacher has to offer us. She previously published a young adult novel called Disconnected, which addressed bolder topics and struggles most teens could be going through.

Ms. Collins said that Disconnected creates “A world where instead of high school graduation, all seniors are surgically altered to merge their minds with the DataStream/internet. However, the point of the book is more about finding what matters in both the virtual and physical world and then holding onto those dreams.”

Ms. Collins had some strong advice for students who were thinking about writing professionally: “If you think or have been told that you are too young to begin a novel, begin it anyway. A lot of my early work as a teenage writer wasn’t very good, but each story has helped me learn so much about my own writing style. You can’t wait for one day when really, the process is one day at a time.”

Ms. Collins is not done yet – she revealed that over the summer she wishes to begin the second book of The Swamp of Doom series, leaving her readers excited for the road ahead!