Deirdre O'Dare, who also writes contemporary romance as Gwynn Morgan, has loved reading and writing since early childhood. She started writing—simple verses and paraphrases of Nancy Drew and Zane Gray—before she was out of grade school and finally settled into romantic fiction in the last decade after leaving her "day job" as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army. She lives in Arizona and frequently sets her stories in the Southwest she knows and loves, but now and then another locale calls to her creativity and she strays, even as far as prehistoric Greece and places that exist only in her imagination.