by Virginia Lloyd | Oct 3, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
Here’s a beautiful Pablo Neruda poem I heard for the first time this weekend at a friend’s literary gathering in Sydney. It’s an untitled work from the volume Absence and Presence, translated by Alastair Reid and featuring photographs by Luis Poirot,...
by Virginia Lloyd | Aug 25, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing, Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
My memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, is now available in paperback (in Australia). It has been included in the 2009 Books Alive! campaign, which means the cover features a sticker declaring it to be “One of the 50 Books You Can’t...
by Virginia Lloyd | Aug 23, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut lists these rules for writing a short story: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at least one character he or she can...
by Virginia Lloyd | Aug 7, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
I am one of many people in the US and Australia and elsewhere who are always looking for ways to engage more people with some amazing music that doesn’t fall neatly into one musical category. We are still relying on a term called “jazz” that is often...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jul 6, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
Having a few years ago abandoned the 9-5 office life for the life of a project-based consultant and writer (whose working schedule resembles nothing so much as the extreme ups and downs of a polygraph), I am still amazed at the extent to which my expectations of my...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jun 26, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
It’s years since I’ve seen a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one of my favourite of his plays (you’d have to be a right curmudgeon to dislike it). So when a friend offered me a last-minute free ticket courtesy of a colleague who was...