I’ve always been an escapist by nature. It started with immersing myself in a good book. You know, the kind that are so convincing you believe you’ve traveled to another time and place. As a child, I would make up stories in my head based on the characters in books I’d read, other scenarios, other characters, as a means of avoiding a return to everyday life. I suppose that’s why I’ve gravitated toward historical settings. The lives of those characters was so different from our own—often dangerous and gritty, yes, but also fascinating. Eventually this penchant for tuning out the mundane translated itself into writing my own stories.

Feel free to kick back, browse about and, above all, escape for a while.