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.
You’ve got to love it when you read something and it inspires you to improve on your own work. I have to pick up Shadowlight. I’ve been disappointed in almost everything I’ve read lately. I think it might just be me though. LOL
Sasha, I know sometimes I’m too preoccupied with the stories in my own head or too burned on words to enjoy reading. But Shadowlight will not disappoint!
She hasn’t written anything yet that has disappointed me. 🙂
No, although that Stardoc cliffhanger ending made me scream! (The 2nd book, I think it was)