Battle the winter blues at N. N. Light’s Book Heaven Shake Off Winter Doldrums Book Festival. 27 books, 23 authors, a huge giveaway plus sure-fire ways to combat your winter melancholy! https://www.nnlightsbookheaven.com/shake-off-winter-doldrums
Something Great is Coming
I’m in the final editing stage for Waiting for the Son. It’s very exciting. I’m currently debating the whole “preorder” process. The last time I tried it, all of the preorders were lost and not recovered due to a glitch with the retailer.
Anyway, while I’m finalizing the book, I have returned to my playlist—songs that remind me of my hero or his story. Pull up a chair and your beverage of choice, and take a listen.
Love in Abundance
February is the month of love, isn't it?
When I write, I consider all types of love. Not just romantic love, like the hot, passionate love between Chey and Zander in House of the Rising Son. But also the love Chey has for his children, the "I'd give my life for you" love that parents have.
Then there is the love between friends. I say I love you to my friends regularly. I don't want them to doubt how much they mean to me. Although he has yet to say it, you know by his actions that Chey loves Consuela, drag queen and the nanny of his children, with his whole heart.
We love our families--and that holds different kinds of love. I love my mother deeply. I admire and am grateful for her strength. I wouldn't be the same person without her love. But I love my sister quite differently. She was my role model, my "true believer", and my first friend. Life without her is...not the same.
Chey hates his half-brother Richard, the torturer. Seriously. I don't use the "h" word lightly. But the love he had for his mother and the powerful love he received from her enabled him to move beyond the hate. He may never admit it, but he loves his sometimes controlling father, too. He's realizing his dad loves him the best way he can.
Our pets are often on the receiving end of our love, aren't they? They fill all the empty spaces in our lives and in our hearts. We feel their unconditional love . Toby likes to sleep on me, upside down. He hears my voice on the phone when I call my partner from the car, and stands in the window as I drive into the driveway. If that isn't love...
I also love potato chips, Prince, BTS, and the beach--an altogether different kind of love.
Love comes in many forms. We are fortunate in that way. May your February (and the rest of your life) be filled with an abundance.
Thanks for being here.
National Library Lover's Month
Although I don’t regularly frequent libraries anymore, they were a big part of my life. The library was one of the biggest and newest buildings in my hometime. I remember how it felt to walk thought the doors…and how it smelled. Like books!
My mom would take my siblings and I there when we were very young. I was hooked on old books like Miss Piggle-Wiggle books, Pippi Longstocking, and Nancy Drew. As I got older, I could get to the library by myself, and I read tons of books I probably shouldn’t have read. Rubyfruit Jungle, Helter Skelter, s a biography of Alice Cooper , and ALL of Gordon Merrick’s books come to mind. Of course, the book that had the greatest impact on me at that time was Interview with a Vampire. I still think of it as one of the most erotic books I’d ever read.
In college, the library was humongous. Tables with bankers lamps were everywhere. There was a section that had dim lighting and vending machines. Between school work and reading for the sheer joy of it, I practically lived there.
Reading was my escape. Libraries were my sanctuary. Happy National Library Lover’s Month
It's Not A Small Life
Today, I heard someone say that they know they lead a small life.
It was, in fact, the second time I’ve heard it. A character on a drama series also said it. The comment, so soft on the surface, hit me pretty hard both times. What might it mean, to live a small life?
I’m not going to say more about the real person who said it. That’s not fair. But it’s worth talking about the fictional person. Based on the rest of the story, the character seemed to mean that his life is unexceptional. Ordinary. He had a job as a salesman; he made a living, but he wasn’t close to being rich. He lived in a small apartment, had a couple of friends. He was, by all accounts, a good son, a great big brother, and a loving boyfriend. He meant he was neither a hero or a villain. He wasn’t part of the elite, nor was he a criminal (despite being surrounded by them).
But…
He was really good at his job. His boss valued his work and supported him during a difficult time. He loved and had a close relationship with his mother and his sister. His friends cared enough to defend him when the going got rough. His girlfriend loved him as completely and as deeply as he loved her. He fiercely protected his family, sometimes to his detriment.
He touched the lives of many people. He loved and was loved. Sounds like a colossal life to me.
Release Blitz: Swingers Light Up Vegas, by Adriana Kraft
Join me in welcoming Adriana Kraft!
At 90? Really?
In case you missed it, Movie Star Rita Moreno, 91, recently owned up on TV to becoming aroused while filming her latestmovie. The scene? A men’s football locker room featuring, you guessed it, virile hunks changing clothes.
Meanwhile, I was recently chatting with a librarian friend about the erotic romance my husband and I co-author under our pen name, Adriana Kraft—at our age. My friend laughed and told me about an elderly woman who came to her library each week to request specific books. When she warned the woman how explicit one of the books was, the woman drew herself up and proclaimed, “I’m not dead yet!”
Both these women – Rita Moreno and our librarian’s patron – are three to four decades older than the happily married pair who star in our brand-new release, Swingers Light Up Vegas. Dan and Ginger have been swingers since their children grew up and left home a few years back, and they’re in Las Vegas to celebrate Ginger’s fiftieth birthday.
Swinging at 50? Feeling sexy (and desirable) at 50? Hardly a stretch of the imagination. There are lots of swingers age 50 and older. In some larger cities, there are clubs specifically by and for the older swing set, who’ve often aged out of more general lifestyle gatherings.
I think our fictional couple could easily have found such a club on their Las Vegas trip – in fact, they were referred to it by somewhat older friends back home in the Midwest.
We’ve created this short story to feed reader fantasies with a taste of the swing lifestyle. If you like this teaser, we hope you’ll come back for more!
What happens in Vegas…
Swingers Dan and Ginger head to Las Vegas to celebrate Ginger’s fiftieth birthday. Through their friends back home, they’ve scored a free week at a posh Vegas resort condominium. They fill their days with every iconic Las Vegas experience they can dream up. But by night? They’re determined not to leave Vegas without sampling what it has to offer in the erotically charged swing lifestyle. A Vegas swing club beckons – will it live up to their fantasies?
Excerpt
Déjà vu, all over again.
Ginger wasn’t sure if the thought was part of her dream or part of her waking up, but it made her smile. Her full-body stretch confirmed she had some aching muscles—not really sore, but a soft ache that brought back steamy memories. What a night!
She finally opened her eyes to the sight of Dan holding out a hot mug of coffee. If the scent had awakened her, she had no memory trace.
Dan settled in next to her on the bed, a broad smile on his face that she knew mirrored her own. “What a treat,” she said, “to watch you with Lai last night. She sure is a cracker jack. High energy—wonder if she’s insatiable.”
“Pretty close, I’d say. I’m so glad they want another round before we leave. If we do decide to buy a condo here, it looks like the swinging scene is pretty promising. And you’ve gotta know how much I loved watching you and Lai together. You two were so in sync.”
“I do know.” Ginger snuggled a bit closer and clasped Dan’s free hand with her own. “When we started this adventure, it was mostly so I could act on the bi identity I’d finally become aware of. I had no clue how much watching me with another woman would be a turn-on for you, too.”
Book Information:
Swingers Light Up Vegas
By Adriana Kraft
Release Date: January 30, 2023
Length: 5,500 words
Tags: Short Story, Erotic Romance, Swing Lifestyle, Later in Life, LGBTQ
Buy Links:
FREE with subscription to Adriana Kraft’s Newsletter:
https://storyoriginapp.com/giveaways/d1c82f5e-9b43-11ed-8c5e-b712215e57d9
PURCHASE FOR 99 CENTS
Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/bQN2lZ
Available at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, ScribD, Smashwords
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Adriana Kraft is the pen name for a married pair of retired professors writing erotic romance and erotic romantic suspensetogether. We like to think we’ve broken the mold for staid, fusty academics, and we hope lots of former profs are enjoying life as much as we are. We believe that love is love is love, and weoften feature bisexual women and ménage in our erotic romance stories. Together we have published more than fifty erotic romance novels and novellas to outstanding reviews.
During our academic careers, we lived in many states across the Midwest. We love to travel, so when we retired, we sold our house and took off in our motor home across the country. We now make our home in southern Arizona, where we enjoy hiking, golf, and travel, especially to the many Arizona Native American historical sites.
We’ve featured the swing lifestyle in a number of our erotic romance stories. We penned this short story to give readers a quick taste of swinging – erotically charged, always, and a safe place for bisexual women to express the full range of their sexuality. We’ve written an entire series of novellas set in the lifestyle, entitled Swinging Games. We hope you’ll check them out! And as always, reviews are the lifeblood of romance authors, so we hope you’ll leave one for us.
Website: https://adrianakraft.com
Blog: https://www.adrianakraft.com/blog
Newsletter: free download of our erotic romance novella Cherry Tune-Up for signing up.
Twitter https://twitter.com/AdrianaKraft
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adriana.kraft.5
Facebook Fan Page https://www.facebook.com/AdrianaKraftAuthor
Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/author/adrianakraft
GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1578571.Adriana_Kraft
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kraftadriana/
BookBub https://www.bookbub.com/authors/adriana-kraft
Extasy Books Page https://www.extasybooks.com/adriana-kraft
Universal Letter Writing Week: January 8-14
Communicating is an interesting endeavor. There are a number of different media you can use: written, personally addressed; written to a general audience; face-to-face in person; video technology; audio technology; email; texts/instant message. I often teach about communication, explaining that each one of these mediums has benefits and challenges. Face to face communication is objectively the richest. Think of all the information that is conveyed through not only words, but tone of voice, cadence, inflection, facial expression, gestures, etc. Text is the worse, and maybe I’ll talk about that sometime. But for now, I want to talk about what I consider to be the next best medium—the handwritten letter.
I love writing letters. As an adult, I had a whole host of penpals around the world that I met through a fanclub. We wrote for many years. Some of them grew to be very close friends that I'm still in touch with. I have even met a handful. That was a cool experience, hanging with someone you haven’t met before, but knowing them intimately. One of them became my partner.
I hardly get letters anymore. I miss it. Every letter feels like a gift. Think about it. Someone took the time to pick the right stationery or cards, the right pen. and then give you a little piece of themselves through their handwriting. Here’s a fun fact about me: If I never buy another piece of stationery and notecards, I am sure I have enough to last the rest of my lift—and share some, too. I think the end of letter writing caught me by surprise.
You might not want to acknowledge this, but email killed the handwritten letter--or at least critically injured it. Even my long-term penpals have opted for the immediate gratification of texts, the convenience of email, or worse-->social media. Consequently, letter writing is a lost art. And now they aren't teaching cursive? I could type a whole email about that.
I hope we can one day return to the age of the letter. I think people will get tired of emails and texts. They don’t replace the personal connection that you’d get with a handwritten note. Here’s a challenge: If it’s been a while for you—or if you’ve never done it, write someone a letter. It can be brief or long, funny or serious. It doesn’t matter. Whoever you gift a letter to will appreciate it tremendously, and it will make them feel treasured.
You might be thinking that my vision of a return to letter writing is just a pipedream. Ah, well. At least we haven't stopped writing stories.
Take the challenge and let me know what happens!
Cover Reveal: Swingers Light Up Vegas by Adriana Kraft @AdrianaKraft #EroticRomance #SwingLifestyle
Please join me in welcoming Adriana Kraft to LAM. We’re excited to be a part of your cover reveal!
************
I am so excited about this cover from Veridian Rose Graphics for our upcoming release! My husband and I, who write together under this pen name, created a (very) short story to give our readers a sample of the highly charged erotic world enjoyed by a fictional mid-life couple in the swing lifestyle. Swingers Light Up Vegas will be released on January 30, and pre-order will be available later this week.
On our last trip to Las Vegas, we scoured the city for photos and adventures we could gift to those characters, hoping one of the pics could be used on our cover.
Did our cover artist use them?
No, but it wasn’t her fault.
We’d told her we wanted two things on the cover: something sexy, and something that anchored the cover explicitly in Las Vegas.
So even though all the photos say “Vegas” to me, none of them really scream it for anyone else. The fabulous High Roller LINQ? Lots of cities have those by now, and a nighttime shot says nothing about which city it is. Ditto a Lazy River. Pick a tropical setting anywhere (or even just a relatively warm one), and lots of resorts sport them. The view from the Stratosphere? We actually didn’t even send her that one; it does picture the famous strip, but from such a distance that it’s not distinctive. And the same with the view out our 8th floor window. It gave us lots of pleasure, every night, to watch the sun set over the south end of the strip, but the photo isn’t identifiably Vegas. You can catch all those photos at https://wp.me/p9O7pv-336
Valerie June Bondarenko of Veridian Rose Graphics is the artist we approached to create our cover. She began by offering us several “sexy” photo options to consider, and both Hubs and I were immediately drawn to the shot with a window, roses in a vase, and a partially clad female torso wearing black lace. Perfect. The swing lifestyle is focused on women and what women want; men may love to ogle, but women call the shots. We think our cover gives her the power to beckon, and the power to say no.
Next question: what to put in the window? That’s where we’d thought the High Roller LINQ could go, but it didn’t really work, and it would still have left us with the question of how to convey Vegas. Valerie came up with the idea of the iconic Las Vegas welcome sign in the window, and when we got the draft, we both said “wow.” It’s perfect.
Next dilemma: the window-roses-black lace pic wasn’t the right dimensions for a cover, and anyway we still needed placement for the title and author. We were clueless, but Valerie came up with the dark red lace on black borders top and bottom. This is why she's the artist.
Last issue: font for title and author. We thought about neon lights – we think she’s captured that spirit in the title font and colors. Plus it’s a fun touch that “light up” actually lights up the title. And who doesn’t love seeing their name in big bold letters?
So yes, we signed off on her first complete cover draft immediately and are thrilled we did. We highly recommend her:
BLURB
Swingers Light Up Vegas
What happens in Vegas…
Swingers Brett and Jen head to Las Vegas to celebrate Jen’s fiftieth birthday. Through their friends back home, they’ve scored a free week at a posh Vegas resort condominium. They fill their days with every iconic Las Vegas experience they can dream up. But by night? They’re determined not to leave Vegas without sampling what it has to offer in the erotically charged swing lifestyle. A Vegas swing club beckons – will it live up to their fantasies?
BOOK INFO
Genre: Erotic Romance, Bisexual, Later in Life
Release Date: January 30, 2023
Length: 5K words
Price: 99 cents
BUY LINK
Pre-order coming soon at https://books2read.com/
TAGS
Bisexual erotic romance, LGBTQ+, Swing Lifestyle, Ménage, Later in Life, Las Vegas
ABOUT ADRIANA KRAFT
Adriana Kraft is the pen name for a married pair of retired professors writing erotic romance and erotic romantic suspense together. We like to think we’ve broken the mold for staid, fusty academics, and we hope lots of former profs are enjoying life as much as we are. We believe that love is love is love, and we often feature bisexual women and ménage in our erotic romance stories. Together we have published more than fifty erotic romance novels and novellas to outstanding reviews.
During our academic careers, we lived in many states across the Midwest. We love to travel, so when we retired, we sold our house and took off in our motor home across the country. We now make our home in southern Arizona, where we enjoy hiking, golf, and travel, especially to the many Arizona Native American historical sites.
AUTHOR LINKS
https://linktr.ee/AdrianaKraft
Tagged: #swinglifestyle, #Menage, #laterinlife, #LasVegas
Intentions
We did it.
We completed another 365 day orbit around the sun. Was the journey everything you wanted it to be?
Our orbit around the sun.
I think mine was. I accomplished a few things and was pleasantly surprised by some of them. I also took on too much and created an unnecessary level of stress. But 2022 has ended and it’s time to focus on my intentions for the future.
My priority for 2023 is self-care. I know to some of you that may sound pretty self-centered. It is, but it is not selfish. If I don’t take care of myself. I won’t have enough energy, brain power, to do what I need for my family, my writing, and teaching. I cannot continue with the level of stress I’ve had in prior years. So there will be relaxation, time to rejuvenate, a lazy weekend now and then and healthy, delicious food.
Of course, to manage all of this I have to step up my efficiency and organization. I have a few ideas about how to do this.
Buy and commit to using a planner. I know, duh. But using it consistently is the hard part.
Schedule DIY spa days. Write them prominently on the calendar so I can’t plan over them.
Plan meals. I find when I take it day by day I eat worse than when I have and follow a plan.
Find an exercise I enjoy. I’ve tried Tai Chi a few times and I really like it. It adds more movement to my day while simultaneously giving my mind moments of peace. To start, I’m going to practice 3 times week. When I’m successful, I’ll increase it.
Drink water. It’s so simple, but despite the fact that I feel better when I do, I don’t drink enough.
Limit exposure to the news. I am not saying I’ll be ignorant to what’s happening in the world. I’ll stick to the NY Times and other legitimate sources, and I won’t digest every sad or scary prediction.
What are your intentions for the year?
Festive Food!
When I was young, my family had the same meal for Christmas that we had for Thanksgiving: Turkey, dressing, potato salad, macaroni salad, cranberry sauce, green beans, collard greens, candied sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese. If we were having a ton of people over, my mom might also cook a glazed ham. For New Years, she’d make a lasagna and black-eyed peas and rice with greens and cornbread, a traditional southern meal that is supposed to usher in good luck.
Today, Christmas celebrations are much simpler. We make a small charcuterie board and appetizers: pigs in a blanket, brie en croute, tiny quiches. We munch on them from Christmas eve through Christmas night. We get a little fancier for New Years because it’s my partner’s birthday. This year—Crab legs! I can’t wait.
What do you eat for the holidays? Do you have any food traditions?
Just in time for the holidays!
Join us for a holiday book fair featuring LGBTQ+ fiction. Find your favorite authors and discover some new ones!
Holiday Transformation
Our Christmas Tree. Every ornament has special meaning. For instance, we bought a house. We LOVE Rhode Island Comiccon, and chips are our favorite snack.
Like so many other things, how we celebrate holidays changes overtime. Elaborate celebrations become incrementally simpler yet more precious. Large gatherings shrink into cozy, intimate groups. It’s a bittersweet process.
We also change in terms of the gifts we give. Gone is the need to demonstrate how we feel by the caliber and expense of the gifts. Instead, we look for gifts with meaning. In both cases, getting a surprised and delighted reaction was the goal. But gradually this becomes more difficult. What do you get for that person who needs nothing and wants little?
The pandemic and years of gift giving set the stage for dramatic changes in how my partner and I exchange gifts. Instead of each one buying for the other, together we buy gifts we both want. Often these were experiences instead of things—a weekend in Rhode Island, a few days at a casino resort. When we went to stores more frequently, we strolled the malls and specialty stores looking for nothing in particular but buying things that made us both smile.
Part of our christmas visit. We may need a special table for this next year.
This year, we declared every package that comes to our door to be a present. At this point, the floor around our tree is covered with boxes, and bags and poster tubes. The funny thing is, by the time the holiday gets here, we both will probably forget what we bought. We’ll be surprised after all.
How do you “holiday”?
