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Adriana Kraft

Adriana Kraft

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

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Gardens: Mine, and my heroine’s #Gardening #RomanceHeroine #EroticRomance

November 27, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

Most of the year here in the southern Arizona desert, “gardening” consists of either (a) nothing, or (b) moving landscape rock around. Having spent many years in the upper Midwest, I miss so many of my perennials – the snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, iris, peonies, and hostas I kept in several beds. None of those would survive here.

So I always welcome the moment when I can get my hands in the dirt again and cultivate growing things.

Thankfully, now is the season for setting a potted plant in the ground, and now is when our Desert Marigolds send up what seems like thousands of seedlings in front of the house.

I’ve nursed a fledgling bougainvillea in its pot through two summers and one winter. It’s finally happy and established enough to be set in the earth. We spent a week digging the hole – with our hard soil, the process consists of soaking the spot with water, waiting a couple days, digging down 4 or 5 inches, then repeating the process – to 10 inches, for this one. But it’s planted and thriving.

And the marigolds? Here’s a photo from a few years back. They’re a major natural wildflower throughout much of the Sonoran Desert, and our plot was seeded with them when we moved in. I quickly learned that unless I thin them as they emerge, I’ll have a messy non-lovely patch of tangle. Since they pop up everywhere, each year I decide where I want them to end up, then rake the rocks over the spots where I don’t want them, uprooting the sprouts. This year, they’ll circle the white Oleander we just planted out front as well.

Most of the characters in my novels are too busy with other things to spend time gardening, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like gardens. Here’s a scene from a recent release, Smoldering Passion. Melissa lives in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, but she’s only a few blocks from the beautiful Brooklyn Gardens, where she often escapes when she needs a break.

EXCERPT

Melissa stood and rotated her shoulders. She had to get out of her apartment. It was a beautiful day, and she didn’t want to spend it all inside.

She grabbed her keys and some cash and headed down the stairs to street level. She walked briskly, suddenly knowing where she wanted to be.

Shortly, she turned in at the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and slowed her pace, pausing to watch the ducks in the Japanese water garden. This was space for relaxing – for breathing deeply, soaking in colors and breezes and scents. The riot of spring blooms was long gone, and summer was at its peak.

She headed for the Shakespeare Garden and was relieved to find a shady bench empty in a secluded corner. Daisies, black-eyed Susans, and daylilies formed a casual cluster in yellow, white, and orange beside the bench. Further off, some taller mauve blooms she couldn’t name were full of butterflies, and a curly-headed toddler ran up to them laughing gleefully. The child’s parents stood nearby, holding hands, happy, as if they had no care in the world.

BOOK INFORMATION

Title: Smoldering Passion
Passion Series, Book One
Can be read as a stand-alone
Author: Adriana Kraft
Publisher: eXtasy Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2023
ISBN 9781487438159 ASIN B0C211488L
Length: 70,259 words   249 Pages
Genres: Erotic Romance, LGBT Romance
Pairings: MF, FF, FFF, FMF, MFM
Tags: Contemporary, Menage, Bisexual, FM, FF, New York City, struggling artist, age gap
Heat rating: four flames

BLURB

Her passion smolders. Will it ignite?

When art student Melissa Hopkins finally unpacks the two boxes her Aunt Phoebe left for her and sees Phoebe’s black and white photos, it’s like opening Pandora’s Box. A simple quest to find a new job morphs into an about face—not just in her art, but in her career and personal life. Short on funds now that her graduate stipend is ending, she applies to work where Aunt Phoebe once worked: a center for sexuality and sex studies.

Sworn off women after a disastrous relationship, Center Director Harry Gage ignores the danger signals and hires the striking young woman who reminds him of his former lover. Her air of innocence will captivate center viewers, so he’s sure she’ll be a hit on camera. What he’s not prepared for is how she pierces his heart.

When the sparks flare up, is it love or just sex—and what must each of them risk to find out?

UNIVERSAL BUY LINK

https://books2read.com/u/3nDdOe

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Filed Under: A Day in Adriana's Life, Blog, Erotic Romance, Excerpts, LGBT Tagged With: Contemporary, erotic romance, Gardens, LGBTQ

Day of Remembrance: My Grandmother #AllSoulsDay #Remembrance #Grandmother #MFRWAuthor

November 2, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

I never met my maternal grandmother, who died when my mother was only thirteen. But she continues to touch my life daily, in so many little ways. On All Soul’s day, the day of remembrance, I especially want to share about her.

The thought came to me as I was washing the breakfast dishes yesterday morning, when I pushed up my sweater sleeves to keep them from getting wet. Often as a child when I dried the dishes beside my mother, who washed them, she’d tell me what her mother taught her – that if you got your sleeves wet while doing dishes or slopped water on your clothes anywhere, you’d end up marrying a drunkard. Pushing my sleeves up always makes me think of both of them. And I didn’t marry a drunkard.

My grandmother is also always with me through her love of music, which she passed on to my mother. Having grown up attending a one room country school, my grandmother subsequently graduated from what was then called Normal School and taught in a country school for a few years before she married my grandfather. With some of her earnings, she purchased a Behr Brothers upright piano and moved it into the home my mother grew up in.

She taught my mother to read music, play the piano, and sight-sing. When I was about five, my mother had that piano moved to our house and let me start lessons.

 

Carrying my grandmother’s legacy forward, when my mother learned that public schools in our state no longer taught sight singing, she volunteered in my fifth grade year to teach our school glee club singers to sight read the songs, capped off by our performance on the local radio station that Christmas season.

Tiny threads, from so many people we have never met, have shaped us all into who we are today. I honor my grandmother and these threads on this day.

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Filed Under: Blog, More About Adriana

Huguenot Ancestry and a New Historical Novel #HistoricalFiction #FrenchHuguenots #MyStory #MFRWAuthors @HayesRosemary

October 4, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

Tomorrow, I will host and review The King’s Command by Rosemary Hayes, a lovely new historical fiction novel. Her story traces the experience of her French Protestant ancestors in the late 1600s, during the period of King Louis XIV’s persecution and his revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Reading that story, which is backed by her careful historical research, filled in a host of details about what my own ancestors must have experienced in that same time period. I wanted to place my review in that context, but once I jumped down the genealogical rabbit hole, I gathered so much material that I decided to share my own story as a separate blog post. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for the author’s post and my review.

I did not learn of my Huguenot ancestry until early adulthood, when my mother began looking into her genealogy and discovered that the original immigrant in her father’s line had fled persecution in France and arrived in the colony of Pennsylvania in 1752. Her source (in that era, before the internet) was a story that had been handed down through the family and published in a county “genealogical history” in 1898 – some five generations after the ancestor arrived.

The published account stated that her ancestor’s father had “suffered death for conscience’ sake” and the mother had fled to Switzerland with her three sons, who subsequently embarked for the colonies after their mother’s death. The brother who is my ancestor was well educated and quickly found work teaching in an academy.

In the middle 1700s, upon disembarking in Philadelphia, all immigrants on shipboard were required to come ashore, swear allegiance to King George II, and sign a document declaring their allegiance.  My husband and I were privileged to view a facsimile of the brothers’ three signatures on that declaration in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. many years ago, corroborating at least that component of the information that had come to us.

Not having studied history sufficiently by then to know any better, I naively assumed they’d fled France when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. But the dates don’t fit – the revocation was in 1685, and they didn’t arrive in Pennsylvania until nearly seventy years later.

More recent research on the internet shows that in the 1720s, when the three brothers were born, the family in fact lived in Hesse-Kassel, then a Calvinist region of Germany to which many Huguenots fled after the revocation. Genealogical resources have taken me no further back than the birth of their father, also born in that region of Germany.

The records do confirm that their father met an early death: he died in 1735 at age 34. I have the location of his death, but so far I’ve been unable to get behind the mystery of how he died. Was he fighting in a war? The war of Polish Succession (1733-35) involved the Rhineland, about 150 miles south of where he lived. Perhaps he was called up to serve in that war and campaigned in the siege of Phillipsburg. Did he die of natural causes? An accident? Since he lived in protestant Germany, it seems unlikely he himself died from religious persecution.

Where in France the family originated is also still a mystery to me. The protestant communities of France were largely concentrated in southern and western France. Many of those who settled in Hesse-Kassel and nearby regions of Germany were from regions near Lyon, in the eastern part of southern France. They typically came first through Switzerland, which was inundated with new refugees, and thence to the protestant regions of Germany.

What I now suspect is that elements of the story that was published in 1898 are true, but that they became conflated and condensed in time by the five generations that passed the story down. Quite possibly an original ancestor was killed in France at some time during the persecution and turmoil of the 1680s. If the family did in fact live in southeastern France, the survivors probably did flee first to Switzerland, and thence to the Calvinist communities in Hesse-Kassel, where it appears they and their descendants remained until the 1750s.

In summary, the stories that have come to me offer no detail of what my ancestors did for a living in France, what they experienced across the decade of the 1680s, what event precipitated their choice to leave (an act that was forbidden and punishable by imprisonment, enslavement, or death), and how they managed their escape into Germany. The book I will review tomorrow is a welcome window into what they may have gone through.

~ ~ ~ ~

For those of you who have Huguenot ancestors, whether or not they settled in Germany, I highly recommend this virtual museum:

https://museeprotestant.org/

You can select whether to access its resources in English, French, or German. It offers what it calls “tours” – collections of articles following specific topics, most of which also include historical photos and often maps (as below).

Some sample tour titles:

The Rise of Protestantism in France

The Huguenot Refugees

The Huguenot Refuge in England


Photo credit: MuseeProtestant.org

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog, More About Adriana Tagged With: Ancestry, French Huguenots, Historical Fiction

The Eggplant Story ~ Is This a #MeetCute? #RomCom #RomanceReads

October 25, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

Since Hubs and I don’t write Rom Com or Chick Lit, we don’t really write Meet Cutes, at least not on purpose. A Meet Cute might set an odd tone for our romantic suspense and erotic romance stories…

But having got this far, I’m thinking that how he and I met might be a true-life Meet Cute. Here’s our story—we’d love to hear whether it qualifies. For that matter, if any of you have a real Meet Cute in your life, we’d love to hear about it!

The first time I ever saw my husband, I was a grad student and an instructor in a new program at my university.

Early that fall, the entire school faculty were gathered in the lobby for the introduction of new hires. There were only two or three new faces, but a distinguished looking bearded man with mischievous eyes stood out to me immediately. It got even better when it turned out he was a new addition to the program I was teaching in. I won’t say I stalked him—but I will say that when I got home, I told my roommate about him, and through her contacts in a similar field, she got me his bio.

Fast forward to a Chicago January: Snow is piled high in streets and on sidewalks, and our program is having a potluck an hour’s drive away. I have a car (which I’ve duly shoveled out). The new professor does not have one. A fellow prof suggests that I give him a ride, he accepts, and we have an hour each way to talk to each other. I had two conclusions at the end of the evening – I was very definitely interested in him (okay, I was crushing on him), and I suspected he was living with someone (someone who wouldn’t share her car? Wasn’t sure).

The following week he materialized in my office doorway to ask me for the recipe of the dish I’d brought to the potluck. Triumph! I shared it – and nothing else happened for five more months. He had some loose ends to tie up, it turns out…

Our first date (finally!) was that June, and we married the following June.

Why is this the Eggplant Story? Because the dish I’d taken to the potluck was one of my favorite veggie recipes of my mom’s, an eggplant-tomato-bacon casserole. Hubs and I had been married for over two years when the confession finally came: He’d had no idea which dish was mine—he was just looking for a way to start a conversation with me, and he hates eggplant.

We’re still married.

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Filed Under: Blog, More About Adriana Tagged With: Meet Cute, romance, Romance Fiction, Romance Read, RomCom, True Story

“Too Hot to Handle” and other titles…#MFRWAuthor

February 24, 2017 by Adriana Kraft

Welcome to Week 8 of the MFRW 52-Week Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is How I Choose a Blog Title.

Sometimes we think book titles choose us. Did you ever try to pick something up off a hot stove and go Wow—that’s too hot to handle? Yeah. That’s the level of heat we hope you think of when you see our upcoming title this July. When Extasy Books proposed their Summer Shorts series, we knew we wanted to write about the swinging mid-life couple who star in our Swinging Games Series. The incident at the stove happened the evening after I saw the announcement – well, and maybe I said some other words, too, but they don’t belong in our title. We’ve had a lot of fun writing Too Hot to Handle. Summers can be brutally hot and humid where our star couple live in Southern Indiana, so we sent them to the Wisconsin north woods to cool off at a nudist resort. Wonder if they’ll meet another couple too hot to handle…

Any little thing in our life can inspire a title or a story. We were driving through Ashland, Wisconsin, headed back home to Minnesota late one spring when we had to stop for a construction van that was double parked unloading supplies. When we took a closer look at the figure in coveralls carrying the materials, we discovered it was a woman. Our son is a general contractor, and at the time he had a female interior painter he relied on for detail work, so our title was easy, and the plot soon followed. The book will be released at Extasy Books March 17.

“Riders Up!” is the call for jockeys to mount and move from the paddock out to the racetrack for the post parade ahead of each horse race. We thought that would work perfectly for our four-book romantic suspense series set in the horse racing industry. The title for Book One was obvious as soon as we had names for our heroine and her horse: “Cassie,” and “Cassie’s Hope.” Once that was in place, we wanted all four books to have a two-word title. We love how our cover artist, Rebecca Poole, created symmetry across the series with the title words.

For this last book, the title definitely created the story. Young virgin seeks out her trusted childhood buddy for some sex tutoring so she can please her fiancé on that special night. Cherry Tune-Up says it all, don’t you think? Wonder who she’ll choose for the next tune-up…

When you’re browsing for books, what grabs you first and makes you look again? It can be a close race between the cover and the title – but for me, the title wins out. Titles are almost certain to have come from the authors, while covers are more likely to have a host of other contributors and decision makers behind them.

Click on the links below to hear about other authors and their titles!

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Filed Under: More About Adriana Tagged With: Book Titles, erotic romance, Suspense, writing

#Boomers and Hobbies #MFRWAuthor #Health

February 10, 2017 by Adriana Kraft

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!

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Filed Under: More About Adriana, Stay Healthy Tagged With: baby boomers, Health, hobbies

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REVIEWS


Erotic Romance “Seducing Cat is a Must Read…Hot in all the right places!”


Love Bites and Silk Ties
Romantic Suspense: Mystery and Romance are woven well in The Painter is a Lady.


Romantic Suspense: “The Unmasking is a fascinating tale…some emotionally trying scenes.”


Erotic Romance FFM Menage: “Edgy characters, inclusive sexuality…The Reunion is not for the faint of heart.”


Erotic Romance FFM Menage: “The intimacy is genuine and breathtaking”

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