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.

“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!

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.

A Bright New Dawn

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Happy New Year!

Wherever you are, whatever your New Year’s morning sky looks like, both of us who write as Adriana Kraft wish you the fresh beginnings of a bright new dawn.

Looking East at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

I took this photograph on my morning walk last summer just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we spent a month traveling and touring. So many mornings looked just as beautiful that it was hard for me to select which picture to feature. As I sorted through them, it suddenly struck me that only with clouds do we receive the gift of the most brilliant sunrises. So our New Year’s wish for you is that even when there are clouds, there will be new dawns that beckon with opportunity.

Maggie Anderson, heroine of Heat Wave, has come through a lot of dark times, including the loss of her parents and her husband. Now she’s struggling to raise her two children and make a living off the Iowa farm her parents left her. Farmers around her are bailing out and selling off—instead of knuckling under, she makes a daring move and seeks her new dawn:

BLURB

During an oppressive Iowa summer of drought and farm foreclosures, widowed Maggie Anderson makes a bold decision: She’ll merge her love of horses and her family’s three hundred and twenty acres into a horse farm and try her hand at nearby Prairie Meadows Race Track, where racing purses have just been augmented by the recently added casino gambling.

Down on his luck after being falsely accused in a racing scandal and banned from training, former Arlington Race Track trainer Ed Harrington has skulked home to Des Moines to drown his sorrows and wait for the dust to clear. He’s unprepared for the piercing robin’s-egg-blue eyes of pint-sized Maggie Anderson, who finds him at a flophouse and offers him a job. Can he pull himself together and meet the challenge?

As the two forge a tumultuous working partnership, they soon discover someone is out to get Maggie’s farm and will stop at almost nothing to force her off the land. Can they find and stop the culprit before someone is killed? Can they survive the far greater danger unleashed by the raw passion simmering just beneath the surface of their relationship?

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Print and Ebook

You can read an excerpt HERE

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.