By Adriana Kraft (Guest Blogger)
Do you love history?
I do – as far back as I can remember. I devoured books about far
away times as a child. In my teens I loved Gone With The Wind,
all of Jane Austen’s books, biographies of Elizabeth the First, the
other Tudors, Mary Queen of Scots, and on and on. My husband (who
co-writes with me under our pen name, Adriana Kraft) shares this
tradition. His early years were also populated with biographies, as
well as with Zane Grey Westerns, Sandberg’s biography of Lincoln,
and Willa Cather.
He and I have been
writing romantic fiction together for over a decade, and have been
published in erotic romance since 2006. We have yet to publish a
historical novel – but it’s not for lack of interest.
Part of what’s so
daunting is the need to get things exactly right. We’ve dabbled in
a little time travel here and there (okay, in our books, not
personally...), but
when you send characters back in time you can afford to be a little
vague about precisely where you’ve sent them or when they’ve
landed, leaving a lot of wiggle room for imaginative detail. Setting
a full novel in a historical period we haven’t experienced means a
LOT of research.
So today I thought
I’d share a little about the historical periods that have drawn us,
what we’re learning, and what we’re working on.
There are two: on
the American continent, Native American history, and across the
ocean, Celtic history. Do you detect a theme? We continue to feel
drawn to cultures that respected the earth, honored the cycles of the
seasons, and experienced the sacred as integral in everyday life.
More: these two cultures reflect our ancestral roots. Hubs has a
dollop of Native blood from his mother’s side, and both of us share
UK roots that likely went back to the Celtic era, especially in
Wales.
We turned to Native
American history first. Because we also like to set novels in places
we’ve lived or travelled, we chose western Wyoming and the Wind
River Range – a landscape that reached out and grabbed us when we
first encountered it. A western University library afforded us ample
personal accounts of the period just after the civil war, when the
Shoshone were moved to the Wind River reservation and white settlers
first arrived and brought cattle into western Wyoming. We threw
ourselves into a plot that spanned four decades and traced a civil
war veteran from central Pennsylvania (my grandmother’s long lost
uncle, we love to imagine) who moved west, established a ranch in the
remote Wind River Valley, saved a Shoshone’s life and was given a
Shoshone bride in gratitude. Perhaps you can tell we also love
working with a clash of cultures.
We do have a
completed draft of that work. It’s not a romance, exactly – more
of a straightforward historical novel. But we have pulled it back out
for another look and hope to release it, broken into two shorter
works, later this year.
Delving into our
Celtic roots has come more recently. Partly in response to what we
were learning about Native American spirituality, we took training in
energy healing practices, drumming, and shamanic journeying. We then
decided to explore the cultures on the British Isles just preceding
and during the Roman occupation. As with Native American history, our
original impetus was personal – an effort to ground some of what we
experienced in our training with cultures that are in our bloodlines.
We focused especially on Wales, because of our shared ancestral
roots.
It didn’t take
long for us to get excited about setting a fictional series in that
time and place. We now have the broad strokes outline for a four book
series that opens in Wales during the Roman occupation. A young
native woman is captured and made to become slave to a Roman officer
and his wife, who eventually take her back to Rome with them. She
leaves behind an infant daughter. In Rome, she gives birth to a son.
With her mystical practices, she is able to stay in communication
with her daughter, and across the ensuing centuries…
Well, if I keep
going, I’ll give away too much of the plot! We do have the first
book in this series drafted, and plan to have the series completed
sometime in 2013. We’ll keep our favorite paranormal features of
time travel, telecommunication and telekinesis, but the historical
intervals will be carefully grounded in substantial research.
Meanwhile, if you’d
like a sample of our erotic romance with time travel features, I’d
recommend our very first sale, Colors
of the Night, and its sequel, Aria
Returns, forthcoming this spring at Extasy
Books. We like to think we invented the timeless love
goddess Aria; some days it seems more likely she found us, from
whatever plane it is she exists in. Deeply spiritual but equally
playful, she travels time and space seeking couples who need a little
jump start to their relationship, in and out of bed, and she brings
them ancient sacred sexual wisdom through direct practice.
We hope you love
history as much as we do. It’s so easy to lose ourselves in the
research, which each of us finds incredibly absorbing. We are never
bored – we hope we can deliver our excitement to our readers as we
expand our output in this fascinating genre.
Adriana Kraft
