When I was a child, novels, mostly historical, carried me into other times and places. My favorite authors were women writing about other women and the lives they led. Reading, for me, was a way to travel, better than any time machine or airplane. In my favorite tree, on a hot summer day, or under the covers during an upstate winter night, I could experience Shakespeare's London or Marie Antoinette's France. Novels let me feel the warmth of the Mediterranean when an English girl visted it for the first time in the eighteenth century, and the cold of the Arctic when nineteenth century explores sailed there. As I grew, historical fiction remained my literary home, and when I began to write of course it was historical fiction I chose as my genre. Let the travels begin!