I’ve finished unpacking. Booyah! Bye-bye, boxes and dust. It’s so much nicer to live in organized space.

While unpacking this week, I’ve been working on Adventure Lover and reading Shadowlight, Lynn Viehl’s latest. It’s a spinoff on the Darkyn series, and the start of a related series. Yes, there is crossover; I cheered when Sam and Lucan showed up.

Shadowlight is a complex and fascinating read. It works as a standalone book, and as a series book, and it has a depth of feeling in it and a fully realized quality that made me look at my novella with different eyes.

There’s no comparison between what you have space for in 100,000 words versus 20,000, but I want the same rich experience, a story a reader can sink into, even if it’s for a shorter time span. I wrote something highly streamlined recently (Shoot to Thrill) and while it was fun to write very spare, I want to go the opposite way with Adventure and make it as fully realized and rich as I can in the space I have to work in.

There’s a difference between a book that seems three-dimensional, a full immersion experience, and one that you skim the surface of. PBW inspires me to immerse.