Adriana Kraft
When it's time to heat things up...
“Romance Lives Forever.” Are you a believer? I am! That’s the name of Kayelle Allen’s blog, where she features exciting guest authors daily and lists Free books on Friday. Hop on over today to see what’s free! And then you’ll want to follow the blog so you won’t miss a thing.
So yes, we’re thrilled to have been named a top blogger at Romance Lives Forever in February. Here’s a link to our post: Unreal Love in the Real World. Yup, I think we’re believers!
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!
Welcome to Week Seven of the MFRW Blog Challenge! Music to Write By ~ what a perfect topic the week after the Grammys, which kept us glued to the TV all the way to the end! Fabulous testimony to the power of music.
I nearly got lost in the world of famous quotes about music to come up with this week’s meme from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which I chose because it’s historic, it’s from a famous writer, and it’s about love. We’re romance writers, after all.
But it turns out I couldn’t choose just one quote, so here’s my pick of the best of the rest of the competition:
“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.” ― Keith Richards
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” ― Albert Einstein
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” ― Maya Angelou
“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. ” ― Lady Gaga. And didn’t she totally rock that Superbowl halftime show?
So what music do we write to? As you know, two of us write together under our pen name, and we write to different music. In different rooms, I might add.
Mr. Kraft loves several genres of music, including contemporaries like Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Adele, as well as both rock and roll and country from the fifties to the present. But none of those top his list of music to write by. Both of us have come to love Celtic music, even before we saw Riverdance and Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance live in the eighties. We each have Celtic roots in our ancestry (among other things), so the music speaks to us across the centuries. He’s most likely to have several Celtic CDs stacked in the player to encourage his muse. We also find these tracks helpful in establishing an erotic ambience…
Here’s one of his favorites: Down by the Salley Gardens, with Joanie Madden on the flute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LrZa-QcNQA
Though I love all of the above, I grew up in a home filled with classical music, started piano lessons at age five, and went on to play the pipe organ and the recorder (wooden flute), then branched into folk music with guitar and hammered dulcimer. Perhaps because I studied so much of Bach’s amazing organ music, it’s the Baroque era that fills my soul and most speaks to me as I’m writing and editing. If we have past lives, one of mine must have occurred between 1600 and 1750. The music is in my bones, always familiar even if it’s a piece I think I’ve never heard in this lifetime.
I’ve sung in choirs, glee clubs and community choruses all my life, and choral music (secular as well as sacred) stirs me just as deeply. But when I’m writing, the distraction of the words is too much, so I stick to orchestral.
My all-time favorite Baroque piece is Bach’s Air on a G String (as an author of erotic romance, you bet I’m aware of the double entendre 🙂 ). Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D is a close second, but I’ve known the Bach longer. You can listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrVDATvUitA
I can’t wait to see what everyone else writes to – click on the links below to find out!
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!
Sometimes in my blog posts I write for both of us. This week for the MFRW Blog Challenge I’m writing as the female half of Adriana. I’m actually married to my best friend, and he and I write romance together – but today I want to talk about the role of women’s friendships in my life and in our fiction.
Wherever we’ve lived, I’ve gathered or been gathered into groups of women. To be fully known, understood, received and supported by these women has been a lifeline for me. By now some of those friendships go back decades—and even though distance separates us, we gather periodically and are always able to pick up where we’ve left off. I cannot begin to describe how powerful I find this.
When we write a leading female character (we’ve never done a book without one!), we almost always give her a friend, a group, a support system. Their role in our character’s life is the same as it has been in mine. Sometimes they hold up a mirror, alerting the character to what she’s not seeing. Sometimes they challenge assumptions or push the character to take that next courageous step. Sometimes they just offer hugs and solace for a flood of tears and sobs. And when we write a character who’s missing such a friendship, its absence is palpable. Learning to trust and open up in relationship becomes central to that character’s growth through the novel.
Of all our fictional characters, Cassie Travers (Cassie’s Hope) and Traci Steele (Detour Ahead) from our Riders Up series most deeply reflect this level friendship. In this excerpt from Detour Ahead, Traci has fled from Scott because she’s convinced she can never meet his needs. Holed up in her Chicago apartment, she’s miserable and defeated.
EXCERPT
A week later, Traci’s apartment buzzer rang incessantly.
“Shit,” Traci muttered, dragging herself up out of bed. She punched the intercom button. “Who is it?” she demanded.
“It’s me. Is your answering machine off?”
“No, Cassie, it’s not off.” She pressed the button to let her friend in the downstairs lobby and then waited for the knock.
It was a bang, actually. Traci opened the door and Cassie Travers stormed in. Traci knew she’d made a tactical error by not returning the redhead’s calls.
“What are you doing holed up here like some recluse? You can’t move on by shutting out your friends.” Cassie pulled herself to her full height and pointed at Traci. “Look at you. You look worse than you did when you first got back from California. So what do you have to say for yourself?”
Traci pulled her robe tighter around her body. She didn’t want to argue with Cassie. She didn’t have the energy. “Do you want some tea?”
Cassie slapped her own head with her palm. “What do I have to do to get through to you?” She sighed and pulled off her jacket. “Okay, I’ll have some tea with you. Along with some toast and jam. And orange juice, if you have any. At least maybe I can make sure you eat something.”
Yes. Friendship that knows when to challenge, confront, insist that we reach inside ourselves and put one foot in front of the other. Here’s to the women in my life who have been there for me. They live in our books.
Cassie’s Hope
Riders Up, Book One
High stakes, a fiery Irish redhead, her stunning racehorse, and a fiercely loyal rancher
Detour Ahead
Riders Up, Book Four
Threatened race horses, city slicker attorney, sexy California wrangler—what can possibly go wrong?
Click on the links to find out about other authors’ best friends!
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…