ESCAPE INTO ROMANCE AND DANGER

Did you ever have one of those days? Or a lot of those days? Days when you thought your head would explode at the monotony of your life? You rise at the same time each day, go through the same morning ritual, then it’s onto your job. Maybe you’re a corporate drone and cubicle dweller as I was. Mind-numbing. Boring.

Many a morning as I drove to work, I’d fantasize about something extraordinary happening to relieve the boredom. I don’t mean any earth-shattering event, or anyone’s getting hurt. Just something different. Like I’d come upon a bank robbery in progress and be taken hostage by one of the robbers. Oh, wait, I could get hurt. I didn’t want to escape my cubicle-dwelling world that badly. Maybe the robber is really a sexy undercover FBI agent. That led to other kinds of fantasies I won’t go into. But you get my drift.

Escape, romance, danger. Don’t we all need a little of that in our lives? My life isn’t altogether boring, and of course, I’ll take mundane over dangerous. But isn’t it fun to escape once in a while?

That’s where reading comes in. It gives me the escape I crave. As a child, I devoured everything I could find to read – cereal boxes, billboards, clothes tags. It didn’t matter. If it had words on it, I was hooked. Reading opened a whole new world to me and allowed my imagination to soar.

Within the pages of a book, we can be the FBI heroine fighting a deep secret from her past while trying to bring the bad guys to justice. Or we can be the ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances, caught up in international intrigue and murder. Or we can go back in history and be a young, unmarried daughter of a duke who wants freedom from the constraints of the rigid mores of her class.

And then there are time travels. I love them. Don’t you? I love fantasizing about going back to a time before all our modern conveniences and learning to deal with a more primitive way of living. I’d probably fall apart if I time-traveled, but the heroes and heroines in the time-travel romances I read always cope with their new environment. And they find love along the way. Pure escapism.

Paranormal books and movies are scorching hot now. There are the Twilight movies and books and Harry Potter and the vampire shows on TV. Some popular culture experts say the uncertainty in the modern world makes people gravitate toward the supernatural. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe the paranormal taps into that dark part of us that civilization can’t completely suppress. I enjoy reading paranormal romances. I love witch stories and shifter stories and fallen angel stories. Vampire stories - not so much. I’m afraid of vamps and believe they exist.

Regardless of what sub-genre I read, a good love story is central. I crave happy endings as much as I crave escapism. If, in addition to the romance, the book also has twists and turns, a mystery, maybe a murder or two, and a ghost, werewolf, or witch, that’s even better.

Do you sigh when reading a hot romance and imagine yourself in the arms of that handsome rake of a duke, that sexy tortured werewolf, that pirate who wants to plunder your charms? Then you know what I mean.

Do you ever fantasize about escaping your routine world? And when you do, do you pick up a book and allow it to fly you to exotic places? I hope you do.

I feel like going to Regency England today so I’ll read that book about the duke’s restless daughter. Tomorrow I might want to meet a sexy werewolf. And after that, I may just meet that hunky FBI agent who’s working undercover and takes me hostage.

What about you? What are you reading?