Reading and Renting

Lately, I've heard about a few online book rental services that are trying to replicate Netflix but with books. Of course, books aren't as cheap to ship as DVDs are, but some people might be interested in these services. I was. I moved to tiny-little-town, Arkansas from Champaign-Urbana, IL. I was used to huge public libraries with a great inter-library loan system plus access to the libraries at the University of Illinois. If I wanted a book, I generally could get it through the library. Not to mention lots and lots of wonderful new and used bookstores to browse through to find a good book. *happy sigh*

I adore living on my farm, but you have to drive 40-65 minutes (imagine the gas cost) to get to the nearest big bookstores. I've switched entirely to online book buying, and I'm not totally happy with the experience because it's hard to find a book that not only sounds interesting but is written in a style I enjoy. If only all publishers would allow people online to see the first few pages of a book. I've stopped taking chances: if the book sounds fun but I can't read the first few pages, then I don't buy it. The libraries here are actually pretty good if I search through all the libraries within a 20-minute drive, but sometimes online rental sounds tempting since I read 2-4 books each week. Here are a few of the services I've heard about. I'm not endorsing any of them as I've not tried any of them.

Bookswim - Choose from over 185,000 paperback and hardback books.
Paperspine - Choose from over 150,000 paperback books.
Booksfree - Choose from over 100,000 paperback and audio books.
Bookmoch - More of a book sharing service than a book rental service.

Writing that Gets Published

In a Hatrack River Writer's Worshop thread on how to avoid writing "just another fantasy," author Kathleen Dalton Woodbury wrote this excellent advice:

Possibly the two main things that make people call a story "just another fantasy" are characters that could be interchanged with fifty jillion other fantasy characters and ideas that don't follow [Orson Scott Card]'s advice to toss out the first or second idea you get and wait until the third or fourth or fifth.

He advises this because most people will be likely to come up with the first or second idea (because those ideas are rather obvious to everyone). It's when you really apply your creativity to dig deeper and find the third or fourth or fifth idea that you get interesting stuff....

For my part, if I can't care about the characters, the plot had better be phenomenal, or I won't keep reading. So I'd encourage you to make sure your characters are well-developed, believable, and have interesting motivations.

By the way, the "first and second" ideas bit refers, in this case, to the writer's ideas on how their character will react to the problem in front of them and what will go wrong next.

There are only a few different basic plots, so I would agree with Kathleen is that it's the characters and how they react that truly make a fantasy story "unique." What do you think?

Exercise and Creativity

On her Writer's Beware blog, Victoria Strauss posted an excerpt of a study done by scientists at Rhode Island College. The study abstract said:

The results supported the hypotheses that creative potential will be greater on completion of moderate aerobic exercise than when not preceded by exercise (immediate effects), that creative potential will be greater following a 2-hr lag time following exercise than when not preceded by exercise (residual effects), and that creative potential will not be significantly different immediately following exercise than after a 2-hr lag time following exercise (enduring residual effects).

I'd never thought about a link between exercise and increased creativity, but I agree that there is a link. I love to swim. Two or three times a week, I swim laps for 45 minutes at an indoor pool. I call it my thinking time because that's when I figure out what will happen next in the scene I've been working on or find a solution to other problems in my life. I then go home and write for an hour or two.

On the days that I don't swim, there's always farm work to do. If I get stuck in my writing, I'll often go outside and weed-whack or whatever. If it's too cold or too hot outside, I'll go into the kitchen and start baking (which means the baking takes a long time to complete--I'm constantly running back and forth between the computer and the kitchen as ideas come to me).

So, have any of you noticed that exercise helps spark your creativity?