Gail Dayton began telling stories when she was five, when Bambi came home with her from the movies, but she didn't write any of them down until she was in fourth grade--a story about a cat. She discovered fairy tales not long after that, and her horizons expanded.A RITA finalist for Best First Book in 2002 with Hide-and-Sheikh, a contemporary series romance from Silhouette Desire, Gail won the Aspen Gold award for Her Convenient Millionaire (another Desire), and was a Prism Award finalist for The Compass Rose. She won the Best Fantasy Prism Award the next two years, for The Barbed Rose and The Eternal Rose.Gail lives with her husband, youngest son, and granddog Dolly the Princess Pitbull, on the Texas Gulf Coast, two blocks from the beach. The problem with living at the beach is that you have to LIVE at the beach. You still have laundry and housework and such, only with sand. However, the beach makes up for it.She's a voracious reader, devouring more than 200 books a year, in most genres, especially of romance. She's a big wimp, so she doesn't read suspense/thrillers/really scary books, or horror--although if it's fantasy or science fiction, it doesn't bother her so much, because obviously, it's not real. And she finds a lot of literary fiction boring. Whatever she reads, she writes, which means she's written contemporary romance, historical romance, "straight" historical, epic fantasy, fantasy romance and a number of other genres, because she loves it all. Admittedly, science fiction and fantasy are old favorites--she started reading those back when she still thought kissing was icky...Visit her at http://www.gaildayton.com