by Virginia Lloyd | Feb 22, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
By now The Guardian’s Ten rules of writing fiction has been well distributed virally – I stumbled across it over at City of Tongues, in which James Bradley also confesses to having neglected his blog lately. Well James, not as much as I have neglected mine...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 20, 2010 | Blog, Memoir
Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing...
by Virginia Lloyd | Dec 16, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
This post was prompted by a piece by James Bradley over at City of Tongues in which he considers why he enjoys reading blogs by women more than those by men. His post alerted me to Rachel Cusk’s piece in the Guardian last weekend, “Shakespeare’s daughtersâ€, on...
by Virginia Lloyd | Oct 8, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
Here are the winners in The Washington Post’s annual neologism contest. I am having trouble choosing a favourite from this witty bunch: Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained. Abdicate...
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,...