Erica Ridley learned to read when she was four, which was about the same time she decided to be a writer when she grew up--or a paleontologist, because dinosaurs are almost as cool as books. She combined both loves in a self-illustrated adventure story about a little girl who travels back to the Mesozoic Era, and took her creation to the Young Authors Conference where all the writers she met encouraged her to follow her dream.

Her parents, however, encouraged her to get a college education. Erica ended up writing more programming code than prose, and worked as a web site developer for various marketing firms and advertising agencies while she put herself through school. She started her own web design business, moved from the Midwest to mid-Florida, and somehow found time to graduate with a degree in International Business.

Shortly thereafter, Erica rediscovered her love of a good story and joined the Romance Writers of America. She's an extended board member and webmistress of her local writing chapter, as well as a regularly contributing member of two high-traffic blogs targeted at both readers and writers. Since becoming active in the writing community, every manuscript she's written has finaled or won a writing contest, including a triple-final in the 2007 TARA Contest.

When Erica isn't in her home office in Tampa, Florida dreaming up wacky adventures for her characters, she can usually be found on some far flung corner of the globe having wacky adventures of her own. Although she's crawled through bat caves in Central America, ridden camels around casbahs in northern Africa, and gotten trapped on the wrong bus in the middle of Budapest, she has yet to stumble across anyone purporting to be a real-life apprentice tooth fairy.