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Adriana Kraft

Adriana Kraft

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

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Best Friends #MFRWAuthor

February 3, 2017 by Adriana Kraft 4 Comments

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!

 

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Filed Under: More About Adriana Tagged With: best friends, friendship, romance

The family said WHAT? #MFRWAuthor

January 13, 2017 by Adriana Kraft 11 Comments

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.

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Filed Under: More About Adriana Tagged With: fiction, romance, writing, writing process

Equality for our stories ~ and all LGBTQ persons

February 5, 2012 by Adriana Kraft 9 Comments

I write erotic romance with my husband under the pen name Adriana Kraft. Most of the heroines we love to write and read are bisexual. In addition we’ve written some lesbian heroines and an occasional bisexual hero. So our pairings include M/F, F/F, and M/M, plus ménage, in a range of combinations.

Authors who write stories like ours have just been excluded from entering the “More than Magic” fiction contest based on those pairings – giving us a taste of the discrimination our characters so often struggle with.  The contest is an annual one sponsored by the Romance Writers Ink chapter of RWA (Romance Writers of America). In previous years, all romantic pairings have been eligible to enter, but this year, the entry guidelines state that the contest will “no longer accept same-sex entries in any category.”

We’ve been members of RWA for over a decade, and we’ve celebrated two victories with that organization across the years. The first was an attempt by some members to define romance as between “one man and one woman.” Thankfully that went down to defeat, and the organization’s official definition of romance focuses on the following two elements, period:

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

An Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

The second was the creation a few years ago of an on-line RWA chapter formed by authors of LGBTQ romances. We joined immediately.

Rainbow Romance Writers has been visible and active over the last two days spreading the word about this problem – and, once the first wave of anger settled out, chapter members and chapter leadership have been strong advocates of finding solutions to the problem.

It’s gone viral – several of our members blogged on Friday, Smart Bitches blogged about it yesterday, Suzanne Brockman has been posting on FaceBook, and it’s all over Twitter.

What can you do? Our chapter president, Heidi Cullinen, posted a blog today filled with things authors and readers can do to be part of the solution to the problem. If you care about LGBTQ romance and LGBTQ people, please take a look and get involved.

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Filed Under: LGBT Tagged With: Bisexuality, LGBT, romance

Romantic Bridges, Take #2

October 1, 2010 by Adriana Kraft 2 Comments

Tucked in the hilly Iowa countryside just a little west and south of Des Moines is a very famous set of covered bridges immortalized by the 1992 book The Bridges of Madison County and the 1995 movie of the same name. We’d never seen them, so we took up our friends’ offer a couple weeks ago, rented and watched the movie in preparation and drove out to meet our friends in Winterset. The afternoon was rainy and unseasonably cold, and we lingered over coffee in a downtown café watching the radar on my Blackberry waiting for the sunshine it promised any minute.

At last the sun broke through and we headed out to Roseman Bridge – the last, hard-to-find bridge that propelled fictional photographer Robert Kincaid into Francesca Johnson’s farmyard, and into her life. Built in 1883, this bridge still stands in its original location, though it was renovated in 1992. The bridges were originally covered to protect the expensive heavy main timbers that supported them, since replacing the boards of the roof and walls was cheaper than rebuilding. The main timbers we saw, then, dated back 117 years – how I wished they could speak. Fiction writers are always looking for stories.

In the movie, Francesca rides with the photographer in his truck to help him find this bridge, and later drives back there herself to tack up a note she knows he’ll find the next morning when he returns for his dawn photo shoot. Romantic? Definitely. The countryside we drove through was rich with fall colors and abundant crops ready for harvest. Goldenrod and Black Eyed Susans made a colorful contrast with thick stands of purple asters, and a few lingering Monarch butterflies graced us with their presence in the early stage of their migration south. Somehow, though, the ancient bridge and autumn scenes felt more congruent with the movie’s sad ending than with the hopefulness and optimism of romance.

And then we saw them. A young couple had just finished their lunch under the safe shelter of the far end of the bridge. We walked up as they were packing up their blankets and picnic basket, and I commented that they’d found the perfect place for a picnic on a rainy day. With shining eyes that gave evidence of recent tears, the young woman smiled and held up her left hand to show us her new diamond ring. So much more than a picnic – a new story for the ancient timbers, a happy ending for the Roseman Bridge, and for our day. Now there’s romance.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bridges of Madison County, happy ending, romance, Roseman Bridge

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