I was always good at Show and Tell. It was my best subject in elementary school, and I managed to continue the practice through junior high and high school by bringing stuff to my history classes, things like my grandfather's old Army helmet when we studied the Battle of the Bulge and my family's letters from Helen Keller when we studied her life.I can't stop. After years working at Colonial Williamsburg making eighteenth-century history come alive through antiques and other objects, I spent 13 years teaching American history and museum studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, still schlepping stuff into every class: antiques and reproductions, song recordings, period foods, whatever would capture the students' attention and jolt them awake at 8AM. My collection continues to grow as I buy, find, trade, or inherit items I can use to illustrate my lectures or bring to book signings. Wait until you see my small collection of vaudeville programs and flapper dresses that I plan to use when my Roaring Twenties novel comes out in the fall of 2013!So now I'm a writer with 10 nonfiction books and more than 175 magazine articles (most on history, museum, or travel topics) to my name. A couple years ago, I started writing fiction. Historical fiction, of course, set in the Roaring Twenties. To keep it separate from my nonfiction work, I use my maiden name for fiction. It sometimes surprises people that fiction and nonfiction require equal amounts of research, imagination, and agony. Happily, both let me visit the past while still living in the comforts of the modern world.