Ann Elwood lives in a wooded mobile-home park in Fallbrook, California, with her dog, Eleanor, and her cat, Sophie. She has been a writer all her life and often made a living from it — as a copywriter for insurance and textbook companies, as a short-article writer for Irving Wallace and his son, David Wallichinsky (People’s Almanac and Book of Lists), and as a co-author of how-to books with Carol Orsag Madigan. In her spare time, she wrote novels. At loose ends in mid-life, she went to graduate school and earned a PhD in history with a plan to write best-selling history books. Her plan went awry. She spent the next 30 years teaching history at California State University and loving it. In 2024, she retired. Now she writes novels full time. At last.