Adriana Kraft

When it's time to heat things up...

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Erotic Romance? Erotica? We’ll let you decide… #MWTease #MFRWAuthor

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Welcome to MidWeek Tease, where authors share tempting snippets to tide you over till the weekend. A huge shout out to author Angelica Dawson for hosting our blog hop every week!

 

Since our next several releases are all ménage/erotic romance, we thought we’d show a little backlist love. Fittingly, this coming Saturday, July 1, is the tenth anniversary of the release of Full Circle (Tarot: Three of Cups).

Romance Junkies loved it, but we did hear from a few readers complaining it had too much sex…

Full CircleTarot – Three of Cups:

Hot, sexy, tantalizing, steamy—exotic dancer Barbra Atkins has planned such sweet revenge for her former college roommates.

What will happen when the party’s over?

Heat Level:

Explicit sex: M/F, F/F;

Ménage: F/F/M;

Toys, Anal sex, multiple partners

BUY LINKS

 

BLURB

Exotic dancer Barbra Atkins has spent ten years carefully choreographing every step of her meteoric rise to success on the private club circuit. Now it’s payback time for the two college roommates who didn’t have time for their nerdy classmate ~ add three strapping spectacular hunks to the mix, and revenge can be so sweet!

EXCERPT

The Three of Cups:

Bounty, abundance, celebration, fruition…
all have come full circle

CHAPTER ONE

The sheer shock on the faces of her former college roommates proved more satisfying than Barbra Atkins had even dared hope. Tingling, she blew kisses at the rest of her audience, mainly men but with a nice smattering of women present.

Her fans began chanting Tam-my, Tam-my, Tam-my—her stage name. She stretched to her full height, rising on the toes of her high heels, lifting her long curls off her shoulders, knowing full well how that simple gesture accentuated her breasts. Without checking, she knew her nipples had swollen to nearly twice their normal size and jutted against the sheer peignoir top, suggesting a little mystery. Many of her fans didn’t care about mystery. Barb blew another series of kisses and rotated her hips. A little mystery fed the fantasies, bringing her customers back for more, encouraging larger tips, and generating more lap dance opportunities than she could fit in between dance numbers.

She’d honed every move of the body, every glint of the eye, every twist of the smile to enhance the fantasy. She’d studied hours and hours of tapes of her routines and had rearranged them with a critical eye. Grinning at a beefy man waving a fist full of bills, she danced confidently toward him, knowing that she’d left little if anything to chance.

It was her attention to detail, her work ethic, and her desire that had made her one of most highly sought-after exotic dancers on the national private club circuit. She peered out through the haze at her former roommates, Ruth Nelson and Desiree Rogers, who clearly remained thunderstruck to see their former shy and somewhat nerdy roommate confidently turning on a room full of men and women.

Barb pirouetted and shrugged off the peignoir. She cupped a breast in each palm and then pulled and twisted her rosy nipples to cheers. She grinned broadly at Ruth and Desiree.

They’d all been good friends in college—none of the backbiting competitiveness that caused problems for so many roommates. Ruth and Desiree had been the party girls, often leaving Barb to her studies.

Barb turned her back to the audience, bent over, grabbed her ankles and shimmied her ass. She chuckled at the hoots and yells of delight. She knew perfectly well that the single thong strand running up the crevice of her buttocks concealed almost nothing.

She lost herself in twisting and turning dance movements. Above all else, she loved dancing. On stage she could think. On stage she could be whoever she wanted to be. She stopped to thrust her hips suggestively—stage right, center, stage left and back to center. She knew there were men and women in the crowd pretending to be making love to her as she gyrated before them. She smiled at a redheaded woman in the near corner fondling her own breasts, mimicking Barb’s moves. She often replayed her favorite lovemaking moments while performing, to intensify the experience for everyone. Intense passion—that’s what she was selling. No more. But no less. The audience deserved the best she could create for them.

REVIEW

Romance Junkies: Four Blue Ribbons Adriana Kraft gives readers an unexpected treat with this fast paced and extremely sexy story…If you’re looking for a story with a fun plot, lots of hot sex and characters you’ll come to care about then FULL CIRCLE – TAROT: THREE OF CUPS is for you. ~ Chrissy

~ o ~ ~ o ~ ~ o ~ ~ o ~

Be sure to check out the great teases from the authors below!

What do We Tweet? #Health #Boomers #Pride #Polyamory #SexPositivity

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What do We Tweet?

#Health #Boomers #Pride #Polyamory #SexPositivity

Are you getting the drift? My husband and I write erotic romance together under our pen name, Adriana Kraft. Yes, we are Baby Boomers working hard to stay healthy. Yes, we support Pride, polyamory, and sex positivity. I’ll start from the back of the list.

Here’s what sex positivity means to us: There are three criteria for judging any sexual encounter among adults:

One: consent of all involved parties, at every step of the process.

Two: Pleasure for the involved parties (however they define pleasure).

Three: it contributes to the well-being of the involved parties.

For us, this means things like no slut shaming, such as we encountered in some reviews of our erotic romance The Best Man. Yes, Kitty (our heroine) is a slut. Is that wrong? No. Does it bring her pleasure and contribute to her well-being? Sometimes – and when it doesn’t, those consequences force her to grow and figure out what she really wants. We think that stands for itself. A good read on this topic is The Ethical Slut, by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton.

Working backwards: Polyamory (and multiple partners, whether or not all parties are in love) follows logically from sex positivity. None of us can dictate who will fall in love or even who “ought” to fall in love. Perhaps the most important line in our bio is “we believe in happy endings for all who fall in love, whatever their gender, sexual orientation or numerical combination.” We write fictional stories that adhere to these values, and those are also the values we apply in real life. Tristan Taormino has written a thoughtful book about polyamory that we highly recommend: Opening Up

Pride. Not just because we believe it is right and that it follows logically from the above values, but because both our extended family and our friendship network are filled with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals, all of whom we love deeply and believe deserve happiness and fulfillment in love.

Boomers – that cohort born between 1946 and 1964. This year, Baby Boomers are between the ages of 59 and 77, and no, we’re not among the youngest of those. Our stories often feature main characters who are in their fifties and beyond, though we also love writing younger characters. True love and satisfying erotic encounters can happen at any age and are always to be celebrated, including in erotic romance. Joan Price, an advocate for ageless sexuality, has a delightful collection of erotic stories entitled Ageless Erotica.

Health, without which none of the above would be possible. Maintaining health becomes increasingly challenging as we age, and it is our most important value. We work out. We read up on brain health, nutrition, strength training, aerobic exercise, and stress reduction. We incorporate as much of this information as we can into our daily routines, and we are each other’s cheerleader and workout buddy to keep ourselves on track.

If you are a blogger focused on any of these topics, we’d love to invite you to our pages. If you are a reader who shares our interests, naturally we hope you’ll check out our books at this LINK.

#Boomers and Hobbies #MFRWAuthor #Health

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Welcome to Week Six of the MFRW 52-Week Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is My hobbies (when I’m not writing).

By now if you follow us at all, you know we’re baby boomers, so it should come as no surprise that staying healthy tops the list of anything we get involved in. (Photo – biking in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas).

With any luck, I might need this body another three decades, and I’d like to be able to enjoy it! Our health, our hobbies, and our writing form the proverbial three-legged stool upon which everything else depends.

That may sound way too serious, but don’t worry, our first criterion for selecting a hobby is pleasure! If we don’t enjoy it, we’re not likely to keep at it, no matter how much it might be good for us  🙂 . Beyond being pleasurable, we hope it contributes to our health in some fashion, but even if it doesn’t, a major criterion is that it not be harmful.

Most of our hobbies involve physical activity: hiking, bicycle riding, dancing (ballroom and country/western), walking, mini golf, and golf (Mr. Kraft is a regular, I’ve just started lessons). We thrive on being outdoors, traveling, taking in new events and new scenes, any time the opportunity arises. (on the right, Hecata Lighthouse, Oregon coast; on the left, hiking in Sedona, Arizona).

We both have a few sedentary hobbies – as long as our bodies stay healthy, we’d like to have a brain to go with them, and there’s Alzheimer’s in my family tree, so I’m probably overly sensitive on this issue.

In addition to reading (goes without saying – we’re writers!), both of us enjoy several word games – scrabble, crossword puzzles, the WordStreak App and the WordBrain App among them. I might be addicted to Sudoku. I take on the challenging ones and have to limit myself to one a day or I’ll get nothing else done!

And where does writing fit in? We started writing erotic romance together as a hobby to keep our own juices flowing and follow the use it or lose it dictum. I’ll spare you the details about how our writing feeds our personal life (TMI and all that…) – let’s just say we hope it does the same for our readers!

We blog about health issues from time to time and are always looking for authors and readers to interview about their health stories – leave us a comment if you’d like to be on our guest list!

Curious about what other authors do when they’re not writing? Check out the posts below!

Evening Walk – Evening Sky #MFRWauthor #Mindfulness

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Much of the year we take our daily walk in the daylight or early twilight. But southern Nevada June temps have driven us to wait until after nine in the evening – and even then sometimes it’s still over ninety degrees.

The upside? Getting reacquainted with the night sky. Our RV resort has an irregular shape, so as we walk its one-mile perimeter, we can take in the 360 degrees of the night sky from a range of viewing angles.

20150421 waxing crescent and venusTo the west as we begin our walk, Venus, Jupiter, and Leo’s largest star, Regulus, hang suspended like brilliant spangles on the strand of a necklace. I can’t remember seeing Venus look so large or so bright, but it turns out this happens every eight years or so, a combination of when it is closest to earth, and when its angle to the sun illuminates the greatest portion of its surface, from earth’s point of view. Watch your night sky the next two or three nights to see the waxing crescent moon in the vicinity of this stunning necklace. Here’s a photo I took at dusk in April in southern Arizona, waxing crescent and Venus.

Our next turn takes us facing south. Arcturus is nearly overhead – but we’ve learned we can always find it in any season by following where the handle of the big dipper points. Dropping toward the horizon from there, we find Virgo’s largest star, Spica.

As we turn east, the Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb and Altair (in Lyra, Cygnet and Aquila, or the Lyre, the Swan, and the Eagle) is just starting to rise. When we first bought our telescope and began to study the night sky, this landmark – or perhaps skymark – formed the anchor of our summer sky. In that season it sits directly overhead in the evening, is visible from dusk to dawn, and is a roadmap to the Milky Way.

And finally the north, with the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the North Star, probably the most familiar part of the sky, Why? Because our night sky circulates around the North Star, and these constellations never set, though this week, here, Cassiopeia is lost in the haze close to the mountains on the northern horizon.

This doesn’t always happen, but last night as we gazed north, I suddenly experienced the sensation of being wrapped in splendor and flooded with gratitude.

Day One #MFRWAuthor #Stayfit

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Anyone who works at staying fit knows the syndrome – life is never static, and keeping healthy turns out to involve an endless series of starting over.

Today, it’s Day One after a fun three days at The Golden Nugget and The Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas (well, no end of exercise, between all the dancing and the walking), and also Day One of changing up our timing.

Palo-Duro-Adriana-300x200Summer has arrived. Mimosa sweetness fills the air and the heat is intense. Ten AM bike rides are no longer an option – we’ve got to get up early and ride before breakfast to have a comfortable cruising temperature. It’s only 9:30 as I write this and already 87 degrees – we took our ride (ten minutes, to ease back into the routine) at 7:30, when it was only in the high seventies. This afternoon, instead of walking, we’ll hit the pool around 3 PM. (pic above is Palo Duro Canyon, TX, November, 2012).

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives…

Focus #MFRWAuthor #Health

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Stay healthy? Here’s hoping! As we’ve been evaluating our purpose and focusing our writing and marketing energies after our three month break, we recognized that our highest value, what we prize most in life, is health. It undergirds everything else. Without it, none of the things we value and enjoy are possible.

We work hard to stay healthy. We eat a balanced diet, use fresh foods, and avoid excessive sugars. We spend at least ten to fifteen hours a week in some form of exercise, including core strengthening, weights and aerobics. We exercise our brains through staying curious, studying new things that interest us, traveling, learning new dances, working puzzles and playing brain games. No matter how hard we’re working, we take breaks, relax, get out and enjoy nature, and just chill. And yes, having hot sex is on that list.

When we were younger, I think we were more likely to take health for granted. Well into the second half of our lives, we know it’s a precious resource. We’re passionate about this, and we’ll be sharing more about this passion in future blog posts. Stay tuned.

A sample of what we love about staying healthy: Hiking at Bell Rock, Sedona, last January.

Adriana Sedona Hike 2015