As a shy, quiet introvert, it was almost a given that I would bury myself in books for the better part of the first two decades of my life. I hid from the conflict of the real world, of my home life, and escaped to alternate universes, faraway corners of the Earth, and distant time periods -- both past and future through the pages of my books. In spite of these literary travels, it never occurred to me that those books — and writing — would serve as a path out of the shell I’d built and into a career as a secondary level English teacher and publisher of educational materials.