BARBARA ROMO finished her first book in high school geometry class, penning a chapter a week to the delight of her friends, if not of the geometry teacher. The novel was short, had lots of passionate passages and an exotic hero from halfway across the globe. Her books are longer now, her prose (hopefully) a lot less purple, and her heroes come from much, much further away. Her manuscripts have won the On the Far Side and Opening Gambit contests and finaled in many others, including the Marlene, Writers’ Weekend and Greater Dallas Writer’s Association. Since moving to Texas at the advanced age of five months, she has lived in nearly every region of the Lone Star State and makes sure her alien characters drop by for a visit, too. She’s married to her very own professional librarian and historian, so vacations are split between such things as rummaging through remote archives for information on obscure nineteenth-century Texans and checking out the Marfa lights to see if maybe they really are UFOs.