Adriana Kraft

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

More About Adriana

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

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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.

End of a Dream ~ Horse Racing #BreedersCup #RomanticSuspense #KU #MFRWAuthor

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Do you follow horse racing? We do, and did even before we got together. I won’t say that’s the reason we connected, but we’ve had a fun ride indulging our passion for horses and horse racing. We have our eye on the Breeders’ Cup races at Del Mar this weekend. This headline from yesterday morning’s news brought back memories…

Favorite is scratched from Breeders’ Cup Juvenile

Jack Christopher, whose 2-for-2 record and big speed figures made him the morning-line favorite for the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, suffered a left-shin injury and will not be able to compete in Friday’s race at Del Mar. VSIN.com

A small inheritance a couple decades ago enabled us to briefly own race horses. Mr. Kraft and a trainer friend attended the Barrett’s fall sale in California and came home with two beautiful thoroughbred fillies.

Rainbow’s Legacy was stunning to watch at the barn and in the exercise ring – up on her toes, ears forward, full of energy. She knew she was top dog – you can see how alert and interested she looks in this photo with Mr. Kraft walking her. We couldn’t wait to race her.

And then came the morning we discovered she had a bowed tendon.

We know the horse who can’t run in the Juvenile can heal from his injuries – he’ll run more races, he has a chance to qualify for the Derby and Triple Crown races next year, and he’ll be able to stand at stud. All is not lost – but still, the angst and disappointment felt by all his connections who came to California with such high hopes has to be thousands of times as bad as what we experienced with Rainbow, even though her injury meant she could never race. Our trainer kept her as a brood mare, and she had three offspring who were competitive in low-end races.

We poured all the ups and downs of these experiences into our four-book Horse Racing series, Riders Up, available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. If you love horses, romance, and suspense, you’ll love the horses, heroes, and heroines in these four stories.

Cassie’s Hope

High stakes, a fiery Irish redhead, her stunning racehorse, and a fiercely loyal rancher

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GDWTUGY

 

Heat Wave

Hang onto the land – but at what cost? Feisty widow hires ace racehorse trainer to salvage her family’s heritage. Can they survive escalating threats to life and limb?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GDWTUGY

 

Willow Smoke

When the chips are down, there’s nobody there. Willowy blonde Daisy Matthews has survived the Chicago streets with this mantra but is unprepared for the much older Nick Underwood’s urgent pursuit.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N0DH13I

 

Detour Ahead

Threatened race horses, city slicker attorney, sexy California wrangler—what can possibly go wrong?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RPT6YJA/

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

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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!

#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!

#%&*@ Typos! #MFRWAuthor

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Welcome to the MFRW Weekly Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is “Sorry, Editor: My Common Writing Mistakes.”

I like to think hubs and I are pretty good at submitting clean manuscripts, so this is a hard one to fess up to, but here goes!

When we first decided to try our hand at fiction after having done some academic writing together, we were fortunate to find the Romance Writers of America and join our local chapter. It wasn’t long before the chapter offered a day-long romance writing workshop facilitated by Jennifer Crusie, which was an eye opener for us. We had a steep learning curve ahead!

One of the invaluable things she spoke about, however, was what she called the “Don’t Look Down” draft. You know the moment – when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff, he doesn’t start to fall until he looks down and realizes the earth is no longer under his ninety-mile-an-hour feet.

The point is that when the muse is flowing and the characters are talking is NOT the moment to get all bungled up in grammar, spelling, commas, and proper English. Get the ideas down, however rough. Go with the flow. Don’t look down. Go until it stops…

And Then: Take a deep breath, face what’s on the page, and edit it mercilessly.

Which we do. But I’m here to tell you that even with two of us (plus a couple beta readers) passing a manuscript back and forth what seems like countless times, there are typos that still pop up when it gets to our editor.

That’s because our brains are a marvelous invention – in their mad dash to bring us meaning out of what we read, our brains readily supply what ought to be there, instead of what’s actually on the page.

So our apologies to our editors, who have to weed the typos out and fix them. Sadly, it’s not even a learning experience. If I make a grammar mistake and someone teaches me the correct solution, I can learn that and apply it in the future. But typos? #%&*@ Typos? Random events, it feels like, twice over: randomly hitting the page, and randomly being missed by several pairs of eyes.

Tedious work, but worth it in the end. Thank you, editors!

Be sure to click to travel for more confessions…

The family said WHAT? #MFRWAuthor

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Week 2 of the MFRW year-long blog challenge! Click on the list at the bottom to travel to all participants. This week’s theme? How my family supports my writing.

 

None of us could do what we do without support, and when family is on our side, we thrive – we can take on the world. For starters, the most important family member in my life – my husband – is my co-author, so we face the world with a solid foundation.

We got a good head start in the families we grew up in. Our parents are gone, but all four of them encouraged creativity and supported unconventional choices, however ill-advised some of those choices might have seemed at the time.

Hubs’ mother was an avid romance reader, especially during the nine years she was a widow after his dad died. As her eyesight worsened, we’d hit our local used book store for a half-dozen large-print romance books every three weeks before making the five hour drive to check in on her for the weekend. She did read (and liked) a couple of our early romantic suspense stories, although she confessed she “skipped over” the sex parts. She would probably not have approved of the erotic direction our writing later took.

Both my parents, on the other hand, probably would have, and I think my dad would even admit to some envy, were he still here. His older sister – my aunt – worked for the Kinsey Institute, so no topic was off limits when she was around. She and he are probably doing fist pumps as they watch us navigate the publishing world with our sexy stories. My mother would probably have kept her approval more hidden (she disapproved of my aunt). But when it came time for me to clean out their last apartment, on the bookshelf hidden behind the clothes in her closet I found a well-read copy of the Kama Sutra, so I know her heart would have been on our side.

We carry their support with us, always.