Welcome, All Who Enter Here

Greetings. I'm an author of historical fiction. While I can and do delve into the far past, I tend to prefer the mid-1700's through to the early 1900's, prior to WWI.

Unlike many historical writers I know, I wouldn't actually have wanted to live in these times. However, growing up I always wanted to visit them, to be able to see 'what it was like'. Movies and books provided that, but not always enough, and not always what I wanted to see. Or, many times, not how I saw it in my own mind. Hence, I write what my mind sees now.

I spend a great deal of time on research -- my shelves are filled with books covering different time periods, including college textbooks. Research can be a trap -- it's so fascinating to read and ingest it becomes easy to ignore that I only need one fact to keep on writing.

But keep on writing I do. I hope to share some of that process with you, as well as research tips (which I hope you will also share with me), and perhaps some historical tidbits along the way.

As we stand less than a week away from the new year, I raise my glass to years past. Some were better than others, some were less exciting than the ones before or after, but each year has at least one fascinating instance within it. My job is to find and share those stories in some way.

J.M. Grant