Picture this: It’s early summer, and you’ve spent the day hiking and canoeing in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, barely south of Canada. After a comfy evening by the campfire, you and your main squeeze are snugly zipped into your sleeping bags inside your tent. You wake – and the sky above the lake is pulsing with light.
That’s the scene my husband and I wrote into the opening of our first published romance novel.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Do you have New Year resolutions? For me, the turning of the year is always a moment to evaluate where I’ve come and where I want to go. This year, Mr. Kraft and I took a moment to look back – we now have a total of fifty-eight published romance books available for sale, including novels, novellas, and a few short stories.
My 2024 resolution? To get these books back out in front of you, our readers, one a week, every Monday, through all of 2024 and then some!. I’ll share them in pretty much the order in which they were published.
THE STORY BEHIND COLORS OF THE NIGHT
Sometime in late December 2004, having completed three romance manuscripts and sent them off to countless editors and agents with nibbles but no contract offers, Mr. Kraft and I sat down and wrote out some goals. At the top of that list was become a published author in 2005.
Did we succeed? That depends on how you count it. We did sign our first contract late in 2005 – for a romantic suspense, to be published in 2007, with an e-publisher that released books on a schedule of one a week. We counted that a success.
Meanwhile we kept writing and broadened our submission targets to include a wider range of e-publishers. If you’re a relative newcomer to reading romance, you won’t remember those early days before Kindle and Nook. E-publishing first began to coalesce in the early 2000s, and the first e-books were released as PDFs. There was no such thing as an “e-reader.” An e-book was something to be read on a computer, and e-publishers faced an uncertain future.
The publisher who’d offered that first contract didn’t handle erotic romance, but they recommended another e-publisher to us for that genre. We submitted a synopsis and first chapter for Colors of the Night and were thrilled to have almost immediate acceptance – perhaps the two-week turnaround should have told us something, but we were still newbies. So was the publisher.
I still have a vivid memory of that first book release date, in September, 2006. The book released on a Friday, and we’d been traveling out west in our motorhome but were part way back, camped in Minden, Nebraska. The publisher hosted a reader chat with every release date – in order to participate, I had to hunker on a chair in the campground office to get internet reception.
One reader question from that chat is lodged in my memory: why a “love goddess” and not a “love god?” Because a love goddess is who turned up most often in our own fantasies, aided perhaps by some excellent adult videos written and directed by women. Colors of the Night staked our claim on what we love most and write most often: Happy endings for bisexual women.
Unfortunately for us, that first e-publisher (like so many early ones) went belly up in only a matter of months, and we were never paid any royalties. It took a while for our rights to be returned to us, but as soon as they were, we submitted Colors of the Night to the publisher we have stayed with ever since: Extasy Books, one of the earliest and longest-lived among e-publishers. It has been available through Extasy Books since July, 2009.
BLURB
The dazzling and timeless love goddess Aria pays a visit to struggling thirty-something Jamie and Ryan Hazleton, who are on the brink of divorce. When the hot sex that results from her first lesson cools to icy glares, Aria decides to move in with them and provide more experiential learning. Can Ryan overcome his jealousy of Jamie’s uninhibited response to the delectable goddess? What if he succumbs to his own desires? Only time will tell whether this love triangle with an immortal will ignite or extinguish the dying embers of Jamie and Ryan’s love.
BOOK INFORMATION
Title: Colors of the Night
Series: Colors of the Night #1
Author: Adriana Kraft
Published by: eXtasy Books
Publication Date: July, 2009
ASIN: B003XREZ1W
ISBN: 978-1-55487-319-7
Word Count: 65000; Print length: 180 pages
Heat Level: four flames (explicit sex, FM, FFM, FF; sex toys)
EXCERPT
Jamie heard the tent zipper open and felt the rush of cool night air all in the same instant. Where was Ryan going in the middle of the night? Startled, she lifted her head and opened her eyes. A tiny sliver of night sky was visible through the open tent flap—and it was pulsating with light.
“Jamie. Wake up. You’ve got to see this.” Ryan’s voice was a whisper.
Did he really want her to join him? She hugged herself against the chill, grabbed her sweatshirt, and crawled out of the tent.
Ryan’s hands were reaching for her, so she took them and let him pull her to a stand. Tall columns of color—multiple hues of greens, blues, reds, yellows, and occasional whites—fell in a shimmering waterfall connecting sky and lake. The colors danced across the entire dome of the sky. She’d never seen anything like it.
They stood hand in hand for a long minute, then wordlessly walked down to the lakeshore and sat side by side on a low rock. Shrouded in rising mist, the lake seemed to be hovering between earth and sky with no boundary. Jamie lost herself in the throbbing rhythms of the dancing light.
“This is what I’ve been missing,” she heard herself say. “It feels like magic, like time is suspended. I wish we could catch and hold this moment forever.”
“I know,” Ryan replied. “It’s been difficult to remember such moments. I sometimes wonder what else we’ve forgotten.”
“You have each forgotten how to love.”
Jamie gasped and squeezed Ryan’s hand. “Who said that?”
Ryan shook his head.
“I said that.”
Jamie watched in awe as the mist swirled and collected itself into the shape of a stunning female. The image pirouetted as if to prove she was much more than a vision. Jamie tried not to stare. The woman’s copper skin was barely concealed in a gauzy white gown; Jamie could make out her darkened nipples as the image floated closer to them.
“You two need help.” The phantom shook her head, sending her long dark hair flying. “Your marriage is crumbling. You care for each other, but you’ve forgotten how to love—if you ever truly knew how.”
BUY LINKS
PUBLISHER: Extasy Books
https://www.extasybooks.com/colors-of-the-night
Currently on sale for $2.50 from the publisher. It’s easy to download Extasy e-books to your Kindle. “Send to Kindle” instructions are at the top of the Extasy home page.
UNIVERSAL LINK for All Major Retail Outlets
