Eclectic writer: Adriana Kraft is visiting and talking about writing #MFRWAuthor #Dual author #Arizona #reading

INTERVIEW

1. Why don’t you start by telling us about yourself (Where are you from? What do you write/do in the publishing world? What do you do when you're not writing -- your "day" job, hobbies, obsessions, etc.?)

“We” are actually from a couple places – my husband and I write erotic romance together under our pen name, Adriana Kraft. He’s a Midwesterner raised on a dairy farm; though his parents would have loved it if he stayed and carried on the tradition, he got off the hay baler one afternoon the summer after his high school graduation and went to register at the local state college at the very last moment. I’m from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where my father worked for the government. I attended college in North Carolina, but moved to Chicago for graduate school, where I eventually met my husband, by then a professor.

In our married life we’ve lived several places, including cities, small towns, and once a rural acreage, so we have lots to draw on in setting our stories. We’re now retired from academic careers, where we did a lot of joint authorship of academic articles. We decided it might be more fun to write romance, which we’d both read widely all our lives.

We now live in southern Arizona, where we golf, bowl, hike (in season), go country dancing, and travel, especially to historical Native American sites.

2. Do you read primarily print books, ebooks, or both? Do you own an ereader? Why or why not? If so, what’s on it?

If we had kept hard copies of all the books we’ve ever read, there’d be no room for anything else in our house! We’re huge fans of eraders and each own one. Any more, we rarely read a print book, unless from a library or borrowed from a friend. What’s on our ereaders? Over 400 books (and that’s just from the last decade!), in a wide range of genres. Romance, of course. History – we’re both historical buffs, and now that we’ve been researching our ancestry, it’s been fascinating to read accounts of what life was like where they originated across the centuries. Recently we’ve especially focused on the first five centuries A.D. – Celtic tribes and their practices in the U.K., as well as, somewhat later, the first Norsemen to settle in France, ancestors of William the Conqueror. Good historical fiction (which I often review on my blog) is accurate about the facts and pulls the reader into the story with detail, drama, character development, and suspense.

3. How do you get ideas for your stories? What inspires you?

The three books we’re sharing tomorrow may look at first glance like they have nothing in common: Two Seeds are Sown, a first century A.D. short story about a Welsh tribeswoman captured by a Roman Legate; Three, A Love Story, a contemporary polyamory short story set in Tucson, Arizona; and Through the Lens, a polyamory novel set in Minnesota and South Dakota.

We write erotic romance, so naturally one common thread is that we’re always looking for scenarios and relationships that would make good erotic reading. Most of our erotic romance stories feature bisexual women as a main character, and across those stories we explore a range of “happily ever after” options for bi women. These three stories share one such option: a stable polyamory relationship.

What else inspires us? Different things for different stories. Our Celtic roots and readings, for the first one. Our love of the mountains, the hiking, and yes, the Saguaro cactus vistas in the Tucson metro, for the second. We sent those characters on at least one of our favorite hiking trails. And for the third? More sources than I have time for here. Scandals in each of our family histories gave us part of our plot. Though we no longer live in the prairie, we’ve done so, and we love and miss it, so Through The Lens gave us an opportunity to share its richness with readers, including a soddie house based on one in Kansas where my husband visited relatives as a child. I suppose I should add that his great aunt no longer lived in it, but she did often spend summer days in it, because it was cooler than her house.

4. Which comes first when you're starting to write a new story: character, setting, plot, or theme?

The answer? It’s totally unpredictable. A chance visual can inspire a plot or a character. For Through the Lens, it was a visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and an encounter with a famous painting by Caillebotte: Nude on a Couch. We had our fictional prairie third grade teacher recoiling in shock as a basis for the plot before we even reached home. Three, a Love Story was a response to a call for LGBTQ manuscripts. We’d only recently moved to Arizona and discovered the pleasure of hiking desert trails (both of us having grown up where “hiking” meant “in the woods”), so we knew we wanted to write that setting.

A chance sighting in a rest area parking lot led to the plot of a book we’ll feature next month, Embracing Passion. When we were planning Book Four of the horse racing series I featured last month, we took a winter vacation to a timeshare north of San Diego and were surprised by how empty it was. I’m sure nothing nefarious was actually involved, but since my husband is a criminologist, we had our story idea fleshed out pretty quickly. It helped that the timeshare wrangler, who led a couple horseback rides we took, was both handsome and willing to share about the region’s history. We turned him into a character.

5. Tell us about your latest release – we’d love an excerpt, too!

Two Seeds are Sown (Seren’s Story, Book One) is set in Wales during the Roman occupation. When the Romans invaded the British Isles, they began in the south and reached what is now Wales in about 48 AD. The wild tribes they encountered there presented some of the fiercest early opposition. Welsh folklore has immortalized one of the last Welsh resistors to yield to the Romans: Caractacus (or Caradoc), the leader of the Silures tribe, who lived in southeast Wales in the lowlands along the northern shore of the Bristol Channel.

To subdue the indigenous Welsh peoples, the Romans established forts, built roads so they could rapidly move their armies, and developed one town. Venta Silurum was located in what is now Caerwent, a mile or two off the channel and roughly 8 miles east of Newport. Caractacus himself was ultimately captured and taken to Rome, where he died in 54 AD.

We’ve found nothing to indicate whether or not Caractacus left children behind in Wales, but we’ve chosen to believe he must have done so. In our fictional account, Seren’s father is a local Silures chieftain directly descended from Caractacus, who lived over a century earlier. Seren has inherited not only her father’s standing and his fierce determination, but also several psychic powers from her grandmother, including divination, the ability to time travel, and metaphysical communication with others. These characteristics and talents form the kernel from which our story grew.

BLURB

Resist, or yield? The choice is not Seren’s alone.

Late in the Roman occupation of Britain, a young Welsh tribeswoman is hand selected and captured to serve as a courtesan to a Roman Legate and his wife. Escape proves impossible, but Seren is never completely abandoned. Her grandmother’s cryptic prophecy through their psychic connection seals her fate—it will be Seren’s lot to yield. The words both relieve Seren and further mystify her: You must find pleasure in your present life. Fulfillment will not be yours until after you cross into the next.

EXCERPT

Set Up: It’s been three days of arduous travel since Seren was captured, but she now stands in a lavish stone bath with the wife of her captor…

Once they’d stepped out of the water and toweled off, Livia pointed out two gold bands on the nearby shelf. “You will wear the smaller bracelet around your left ankle and the larger band around your throat. As you can see, they are beautifully adorned with our family crest. No one of Roman descent will dare touch you without my consent.”

Seren stood perfectly still as the woman attached the bracelet and the torc.

Livia grinned at her. “You could waste hours trying to get them off—hours you should be thinking about me. Now then, for the time being, you will not be given your own room. You will either sleep with me, with my husband, Scipio, or with both of us. Understand?”

Seren nodded. She listened carefully to her fate. Escape would be difficult. And she couldn’t even try until she’d earned a degree of trust.

“You will have no household duties,” Livia continued, “other than to tend to my boudoir and baths. I will instruct you further in our language to improve your fluency. I will teach you board games, more of Roman culture—you will want to blend in when we return to Rome. And of course I will teach you more of the refined arts of lovemaking. I would also like to hear about your mystic religion. It sounds so fanciful compared to ours, but I have an eager mind.”

Danger signals flared in Seren’s brain, but she kept her face carefully schooled. Sharing a few harmless tidbits might be a way to humor her captor and perhaps build trust. But what did Livia already know? She and her husband weren’t far off the mark—Seren knew for a fact she was special.

Seren’s father had made this clear. She’d been given special training as a woman because of her gifts. Her father had taught her that long before her time, the Romans had massacred all the Druids they could find, but her father was not her only teacher. From her grandmother she’d learned that the Romans would never succeed in stamping out the magical gifts—the powers that often passed from mother to daughter or to granddaughter, or rarely, to sons. The powers Seren’s grandmother had passed to her. Seren vowed never to let Livia know any of this.

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WHERE TO FIND ADRIANA KRAFT

Blog: https://www.adrianakraft.com/blog

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