After working for years in the cosmetics industry as a makeup artist, esthetician, and educator, Alice Clayton picked up a pen (read laptop) for the first time at age thirty-three to begin a new career as author. Having never written anything longer than a grocery list, she soon found writing to be the creative outlet she'd been missing since walking away from the theater ten years earlier. She enjoys gardening but not weeding, baking but not cleaning up after, and is trying desperately to get her long-time boyfriend to make her an honest woman--and also to buy her a Bernese Mountain dog.