Adriana Kraft

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

A Day in Adriana's Life

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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You can read an excerpt HERE

Blessings for your Celebrations #MFRWAuthor #Holidays

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Today is a special day in our own faith, and for those who share it, we wish you a Merry Christmas.

Did you know the world’s seven major religions observe no fewer than twenty-nine holidays between November 1 and January 15? This includes many of our friends and possibly some of you who are our readers. In our personal faith, we honor all paths to what is pure and holy, so we wish to extend special blessings to all who celebrate this season.

Somehow “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” fail to convey the spirituality and depth of what we wish for you, so perhaps the best words are Blessings for your Celebrations.

In that spirit, here is a snippet of our own observance. Neither my sister nor I can remember how the Swedish Christmas Tree in the photograph came to live at our house, but as far back as I have Christmas memories, we watched our mother carefully unpack this simple tree from its flat box, assemble the two main pieces, and delicately place each ceramic or clay bird on its perch. Red candles were always inserted in the candleholders, and they were lit, along with the Swedish Angel Chimes, during Christmas Dinner.

My husband and I, who write together as Adriana, have set the tree out every year since it came into our possession.

The tree is filled with an abundance of berries and birds. In that vein, we wish you beauty, bounty, birdsongs and blessings in this special season, and we’d love to hear what some of your traditions are, from whatever faith.

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.

A little dream #MFRWauthor #seizethemoment

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In last night’s dream, I am traveling somewhere and it’s a beautiful day, but I need to get my morning Sudoku worked, and I don’t have a pencil. Whoever I’m traveling with (vague, in this dream) goes with me searching all over the city for the perfect pencil – not just any pencil will do. We finally find it, but we’ve missed seeing the beautiful sites we traveled to see.

The dream morphs (as dreams do) and now I’m on Dancing With The Stars, and it’s performance time, and I’ve completely missed the final rehearsal and don’t know my dance.
~ ~ ~
I don’t want to preach 🙂

So I’ll just say that this morning, before writing this post, I took my Sudoku and my perfectly ordinary pencil outside with my morning coffee and watched the sunrise light up the clouds over the mountains. I’m refreshed and ready for my day – I hope the same for you.

pahrump mountain sunrise

My Outdoor Office #MFRWauthor

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1_Trichocereus Angelesii…so my last several blog posts may have sounded like all we ever do is vacation, go dancing, and work out – but we’re writers, and we work very hard at that, too.

 

5_Cane Cholla Opuntia SpinosiorToday I thought I’d give you a taste of our summer outdoor office.

The RV resort we’re staying in has a lovely cactus garden, with a pergola, tables, benches, and even electrical outlets.

4_the culprit - prickly pearIt’s a beautiful space to write while the mornings are still cool enough.

I took these cactus photos during the blooming season in April, but even now, in mid June, the mimosa is full of blossoms, and the air is sweet with it. Morning temps in the 80s, gentle breeze – can’t ask for much more.

 

 

 

mimosa