Adriana Kraft

INTERVIEWED: April 2007


Please introduce yourself

A: This introduction is a two-for-one special ~ Adriana Kraft is the pen name for a married couple writing erotic romance together!

How did you become a writer?

A: Both of us are college teachers and have done lots of academic writing, but we’ve always dreamed of writing fiction, so we decided to follow our dreams and started writing. We write what we love to read: strong women, men who deserve them, hot sex whether m/f, f/f, ménage or more, and believable characters facing the ups and downs of real life (well, except for our paranormal characters!).

Which genres are your favourites to read and write?

A: To write? Contemporary erotic romance, often with paranormal features, including gods and goddesses, ghosts, time travel and Shamanic journeying. To read? Erotic romance, romantic suspense, historicals, biographies. We both read widely outside the genre we’re writing ~ anything and everything can feed into what we write.

Please tell us about your publisher(s).

A: We have erotic romance e-books out at three publishers and one under contract with a fourth. Silk’s Vault, eXtasy e-books, Twilight Fantasies, and Whiskey Creek Torrid.

What are the accomplishments you are most proud of and why?

A: In our fiction? It’s hard to beat the rush of a perfect review for our very first published erotic romance: Colors of the Night, reviewed at Two Lips Reviews (View)

In our lives? Following our dreams, and never giving up no matter what life throws at us. We need fantasy for escape as much as our readers do!

What is your experience with readers?

A: We love talking with readers in settings where there can be conversation and not just promos. Readers ask great questions that make us think and help us write, and getting a reader response that says they were moved by something we wrote is the ultimate.

What do you love and hate about writing?

A: Love? The freedom! It’s so open ended. We can go explore places we’ve never been (in person or in cyberspace), delve into careers we’d never have pursued, throw our characters into impossible situations and watch how they thread their way out, and on and on. Hate? The very final round of editing. One of us works as a free lance editor and loves editing in general, but crunching up against a deadline and knowing there’s no turning back from what’s finally on the page ~ that part’s not much fun.

Any advice for aspiring authors?

A: Most important: follow your dreams! Make a commitment to your writing ~ devote time to it, invest in learning how to improve it, believe in it. Keep writing and keep sending it out. Either it’ll get picked up and published, or you’ll get feedback that will help you improve it for next time; entering contests can help with this. Develop a tough skin. Hang out with other authors. Join writers groups, especially in your genre, and on the web look for blogs or e-groups where real conversations go on and be a part of them.

Please tell us about any upcoming books.

A: We’re WAY excited for Twilight Fantasies release May 16th of Seducing Cat, the first in a five book series of erotic romance novellas called Meghan’s Playhouse. We wrote it as an erotic romp, but also to explore what happens when characters from two different social classes get together. Here’s the blurb: What could college English professor Caitlin Shanahan ever have in common with the brash carpenter Kurt Davis? Meghan Keenan, that's what. The twenty year old sprite has taken it upon herself to bring the unlikely pair together through sharing her sexual delights with each of them. They never have a chance, and town-gown relationships have never been better…

What we didn’t know when we wrote it was that Meg’s hardly finished! Turns out she has a kind of career in front of her getting other folks together, sort of a present-day Aphrodite, so she earned her very own series, and we’ll have to wait to see if she ever finds a true love of her very own!

Where do you hang out on the net?

A: Bryn’s Book Group, Talking Two Lips, CJ Says Follow your Dreams, Beth Wylde’s Yahoo Group, Twilight Fantasies ~ places where we can really meet readers and other authors for conversation. Links to all are on my website Links page.

Apart from writing, what do you do?

A: We still have day jobs as part time college teachers and freelance consultants, with a long range goal of earning our living from our fiction. For fun? We love to travel, to be outdoors hiking or cross country skiing or just watching a prairie meadow put itself to bed, to play with our four boxers, to join friends for quiet conversations, and to commit time to causes and campaigns that will help the world be a better place.

Do your family and friends know that you are a published author? What has been their response?

A: Selected friends and family! Not everyone is accepting of the explicit sexuality we love to read and write. We respect those differences and don’t flaunt our choices in their faces. Those who know what we do love it and have given us great feedback on some early drafts.

Where can we find out more about you, your books and anything else you've got going on?

A: Three places:
(1) Our website http://www.adrianakraft.com
(2) Our monthly newsletter, where we always have a special contest just for subscribers. To sign up, send us an email at adrianak@adrianakraft.com (without the spaces) and put “newsletter” in the subject line; it’d be nice if you also put in the body that you saw us in Elizabeth ’s Newsletter!
(3) Our MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/adrianakraft