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  Virginia Taylor - Author

 

Surprise, surprise!

25/11/2014

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When writing my books I like to give each hero and heroine the one special person each needs. Ally, in Dr No Commitment is an ambitious woman, determined to rise to the top of her profession. Her mother had been caught unprepared by being widowed and ‘unskilled.’

Rohan, on the other hand, is the guy with everything, money, looks, and a promising future. However, his life is complicated. He also needs his ego dealt with by a woman who doesn’t have difficulty in saying ‘no’ to him. Ally needs a strong man but one who can handle gender equality. 


However, in real life we don’t always meet the right person first.

For business reasons, a month or two after I had my first daughter, my husband had to dash off overseas. Needing more than dirty nappies and toothless grins in my life, I invited my younger sister over for a meal. She brought a date, a new guy she had recently met, a handsome blue-eyed blonde. All her boyfriends were good looking so that wasn’t a shock.

He seemed very nice. I didn’t know he was a divorcee but when I got to know him  better, I heard that he owned a house, which was very impressive given that my husband and I had only just bought ours, and we had a few years on him.

By applying for two mortgages, he and his new wife had managed to finance their home but they had no money to spare. Fortunately he came from a large family and they’d been given a good range of wedding presents. One morning his wife rang him (before the days of mobile phones) and asked him to meet her for a surprise lunch a good walk away from his work. She sounded mysterious and he was intrigued. When she didn’t turn up after he’d eaten both the bread rolls on the table and drunk all the water in the jug, he hurried back to work and tried calling her. Her office said she had compassionate leave that day and his phone at home rang out. Shades of ‘An Affair to Remember.’

He was really worried and so he took the rest of the day off and raced home, via a two kilometre walk, a detained bus, and another long walk. When he arrived, hot, sweaty, and worried, the place had been ransacked. The only bed had been stolen, and the lounge suite. The kitchen table had gone but two of the four chairs remained. Half his flatware had gone, three out of set of six. He had three out of six plates, cups, saucers, and mugs. Normally, he is not a suspicious man, but he sat on his tableless chair with his head in his hands and thunk. That’s the past tense of think. Likely, he hadn’t been pranked. The numbers of the missing items were too deliberate. Likely his lovely young wife had skedaddled with what she had decided was her half of their wordly goods.

He would have made a reviving cup of tea but the kettle had gone, the fridge had disappeared, and the milk had been left to sour. Upon opening the cupboards, he found them almost bare. He had half the food and no vegemite, which was okay because he wasn’t Aus born and could survive without this staple. Fortunately, the washing machine hadn’t been stolen - they’d never bought one, a lucky save along with the TV they’d also never purchased.

He told this tale with a guileless smile and a deprecating laugh, which is really cruel to the listener who by this stage, is in paroxysms of laughter after hearing how his wife had left with far more than her share of their worldly possessions, having lured him into wasting not only his time but also his only spare cash on two rolls and a jug of water.

He was truly heartbroken, just as much about the loss of her, but at least he had his savings. His savings! The phone. Yes, his had been unplugged and removed. He dashed into the neighbour’s house and used their phone to call the bank. Wiped out. Every last cent gone. Although he had scraps in the cupboards to eat, he wouldn’t be able to pay a single bill. His water and power would be cut off and the mortgage would be foreclosed. Woe was he.

I didn’t know this last part until yesterday when we had lunch. I had dined out on his story for years and inspired one of the ladies-who-lunch to leave her second husband this way, although she mainly took her own things.

By this time he was suicidal. Desperate. He went to the bathroom cupboard to take an overdose of something because his life as he knew it was clearly over. Yes, she had stolen everything there too, down to the last Panadol. Lucky for him, because he thunk some more and ended up laughing, though with a large touch of rue I suspect. His wife had certainly given him a huge surprise that day.

I’m glad my sister married him. A man who can go through that and still maintain his sense of humour is a keeper. He and she found the ‘one’ when they met each other and without the first wife clearing out, he would never have met my sister. Fate? Or does a right happen to wipe out a wrong?

That’s kind of the theory behind romance novels, wiping out the wrong and finding people like Ally in Dr No Commitment for Rohan. Even rich guys with stupendous egos deserve a break, and a nice woman who can whip up a pavlova in a trice – can be my best friend any day. 


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The Great Escape

17/11/2014

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 Long ago and far away lived a princess. She hadn’t seen much of the seamier side of life because for one reason or another, she’d been protected. When she’d been an art student, she’d been two years younger than everyone in her peer group, and they were cool. They drank, smoked, and used drugs, but she didn’t know about the latter. The two former activities were obvious. However, she hadn't reached the legal drinking age and so she wasn’t invited to their parties where some absorbed every drug known to man or beast, which was lucky because she might have been impressionable enough to want to experiment too.

But, being excluded, she remained pure except for smoking which was the only way she could feel like part of the cool group. Have a cigarette; no have one of mine.

So, a few years later when she began nursing training, she morphed into me and I still smoked but not, of course, where I could be seen. When a prisoner was escorted into the hospital one fine sunny morning by a contingent of police officers, hats on, very official, we were informed the man was a criminal. During a transfer to the city for a court appearance, attempting to escape, he had thrown himself out of a prison van. Apparently he had injured his spine.

First, he needed to be mopped, sutured, and put into a bed. A police guard of two stayed although the man couldn’t walk. I got my first opportunity to see him the next day on doctor’s rounds. We had three doctors in the hospital, though none were in the hospital except for rounds or emergencies. One was old, over forty and charming, one was a younger married man with two children and an ego to trip over, and the last was a learner doing his first locum. Dishy.

Dr Ego was the man in charge that day and he delighted in lecturing young nurses. He had a need to be smarter than someone. So, he showed the crowd of nurses he had gathered around to hear every pearl of wisdom that dripped from his sanctimonious lips how to test where, or how badly, the prisoner was injured. This is very technical and involves running a safety pin (I think he used the handle of my scissors that day because no one had a safety pin) along the outer edges of the foot. If the toes curl, the prisoner has been faking so that he can stay in bed all day and not go to jail.

His toes didn’t move and so officially he had a problem with his spine, though not a bad one, Dr Ego thought. Nevertheless, the two policemen remained to guard him. We pretended they weren’t there and went about our jobs. Privately, we thought it was hilarious that a man who was clearly bedbound and who had one leg tied into a Thomas splint (that’s on a frame and elevated by a rope) would need two guards. The prisoner was very polite and nice and in dreadful pain. Poor criminal.

He had test after test and it was said he would recover with the pressure taken off his spine, using the splint and bed rest for a few months. Eventually, even the police had to agree that he wasn’t going anywhere and in a few days he only had one guard, who got himself distracted by a nurse. The big boss policeman heard of this and we all had to line up for a lecture, because clearly nurses mustn’t distract policemen. I believe the lads also had a lecture that went the same way; we were distracting them. Women are a terrible danger. That’s the way of the world. Sigh.

So, the last guard was removed and we finally got to talk to the prisoner, who turned out to be a really nice man, polite, cooperative. Everyone liked him. We were never told what his crime was. Seemingly, that would have been a breech of something. We began to rehabilitate him and this next stage was expected to take some weeks.

He was incredibly helpful. In those days we had big wards and he was in the men’s, which I think slept ten. Two of those ten had heart problems, no relatives, and no one to take care of them, which made them long term patients. Another had dementia and yet another was an alcoholic who regularly came in drunk, got sober with a tipple of hospital brandy to settle him for the night, and went home to get drunk again. The prisoner watched over those guys, made sure they ate, and earned the respect of us all. I thought we should put him in charge of the hospital because he was running the wards better than Matron. Because he watched for the problems, we could get breaks, especially when he began to mobilise on crutches.

On yet another fine sunny morning, the wards being quiet, I had a break with another nurse at the back of the laundries where we could smoke without being seen. The prisoner was exercising outdoors on his crutches and he waved at us and called out, fine day, and we smiled and waved back.

We never saw him again. No, no, Matron. We didn’t see him. He vanished into thin air.

The crutches were found not too far away and from there he had taken flight. We were very poor criminals. Everyone knew we smoked behind the laundries but the hard evidence of the butts convicted us. So, the powers knew we had taken an unsanctioned break, giving the crim the opportunity to escape. We never mentioned his last wave to us, bye bye, see ya on the Gold Coast, gels. He had fooled everyone for three months.

His was a really great escape.


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Attitude

10/11/2014

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Along the torturous road to being a writer, the dream job in the advertising agency I took after art school only lasted a few months. About all I learnt there, apart from the fact that females didn’t get promotions, was to avoid the hands of the vice-chairman. Finally a few swings of my handbag dealt with the ‘handy’ man, and I was out of work. This meant I had no way to pay the rent until I got another job.

What could be more perfect for a twenty-year-old with ‘attitude’ than a live-in job for young women who would like to train as nurses? Discounting the second part, which didn’t interest me, I saw this as a way out for a while. I applied, was accepted, and fronted up to the nominated country hospital for the two-year training (that would lead to a further two years in a big city hospital) as soon as I bought the ridiculous, uncomfortable uniform. This was, of course, while nursing training was in-hospital and not yet a degree course.

No one told me I was expected to live with a group of seventeen-year-old nurses.

The work was demeaning--hands behind your back, don’t speak until spoken to, wash that, calculate that, and on your day off go to lectures. The social life was worse. In those days, the main aim of the seventeen-year-old country nurses I lived with was to fill a glory box—though glory boxes fascinated me each and every time they were gone through and the contents displayed proudly to me. However, I couldn’t discuss the virtues of plastic eggcups compared to porcelain all the time because I needed to study. Yes, of course that’s a lie.

I don’t have a studying gene. My theory is that if something is interesting enough, I’ll remember. This had gotten me through school quite nicely and since I didn’t want to be a nurse, I didn’t care much about the nursing exams, which I expected to sail through. So, to get away from glory boxes and tales of steady boyfriends who’d been around for years, I used to go to the local pub with my library books and take up a position at a table and read. I could have had any table because no one was in the hotel during the day except me and the barman, who kept inventing new drinks that he hoped would take the world by storm.

Fortunately, he had a tester. Me. Since his concoctions were free, I drank them. We became good friends. Okay, I knew he had a crush on me, but he was a country boy and he’d been married since he got his girlfriend pregnant at the age of eighteen. He had two children, although he was only in his early twenties. That’s what they did in the country in those days, all of the aforementioned. I was a judgemental bore out of water, but really, how mature is twenty?

Every now and again, a tourist would arrive in the pub, see a nubile nurse by herself, and think he could move in. The barman whose name wasn’t John would say to leave me alone because the bar was the only place I could study. I think that’s when I got the aversion for drinks being sent to me. John gave me far better tipples and I had no obligation to talk to him unless I felt like it.

But as life goes, the seventeen-year-old nurses turned eighteen and wanted to go to the pub with me. True sophistication. Naturally, the matron of the hospital accused me of leading the younger girls astray. I was pretty well a non-drinker except for the silly things John made for me, I didn’t have a steady boyfriend, and I didn’t have a glory box, so I wasn’t trying to get pregnant and married.

Almost daily I would be called into the Matron’s office for a lecture. I had exploded a can of condensed milk in the hospital kitchen while trying to make caramel after hours. I had drawn a dotted line labelled cut here on the abdomen of a young, nervous, male patient who was awaiting an appendicectomy, I had let a prisoner escape when I went for an unsanctioned break, I had been caught at the end of a queue of nurses getting in the window of the nurses’ quarters after 10pm (yes, we were locked in at 10pm after a body count—we all knew how to make a credible shape in an empty bed), and I had single-handedly broken every thermometer in one go skating across the newly polished floor with the tray held at head height. Added to that, I had caused the resignation of the hospital manager by getting signatures to stop his wife from filling her washing machine until the late afternoon because the nurses on duty early couldn’t get hot water for showers. Unheard of, for nurses to protest in a group.

I didn’t mind being known as a ring-leader. I didn’t mind being called into the office. I was trying desperately not to like the job I was beginning to love and I honestly loved the matron of the hospital. After all, we spent part of every day together, her at her desk lecturing me and me standing there with my hands behind my back, listening. I loved the long-time patients and I cried when they died. I loved the stupid tricks the nurses played on me, and their absolute loyalty. I loved being responsible and my ‘attitude’ disappeared.

On my twenty-first birthday, I requested the day off. My mother and sister planned to travel to see me, but I had a late shift, which really pissed me off. The trip from the city took four hours and they had arrived the night before. Not a single person would change shifts with me and so I spent the morning with my tiny family. They had to leave in the afternoon, but since I had to work anyway . . . I was still pissed off. I worked my designated shift and because I had the next day off, I wanted at least to leave work on time.

Ten o’clock, time to go, and the phone rings. Emergency operation expected. Would I autoclave the instruments and stay on to scrub up? On my twenty-first? I said can’t night-duty do that, but no, it was my shift and so I got the instruments ready and the theatre. Night staff reported on, wandered hither and thither and as soon as I finished one job, I was asked to do something else. I got big attitude.

I only had six months to finish in that miserable place, a hospital where no one cared that a girl only turned twenty-one once and might have wanted to celebrate with her buddies.

Finally, one last job--go to the kitchen and get a pot of tea for the night staff who were having an inordinately long handover. I went to the kitchen to poison the tea and curdle the milk, and the whole place was alight, streamers and balloons everywhere. The adjoining dining room was also decorated and full of people, music, and clinking champagne glasses, and the noise was horrendous. Quiet please, this is a hospital.

Yes. They were waiting for the guest of honour—me. They’d given me a full, perfect twenty-first birthday, the like of which I had never imagined. The whole of the hospital staff was there, from the cooks and the ward maids, doctors, nurses on days off, ambulance staff, office staff. Heavens! People made speeches and gave me presents. My attitude was stifled by the lump in my throat. I loved that place and I hated leaving when the time came.

In the big city hospital we weren’t locked in and no one checked our beds at night. When I left, the matron didn’t hug me and she didn’t know my name until she read it on the paper in front of her. I wasn’t anyone’s star pupil and I wasn’t the first to complete my nurse’s training (after me, only one of the seventeen-year-olds did).

So, what could be more perfect for a twenty-year-old with ‘attitude’ than a live in job for young women who would like to train as nurses? Nothing, actually.


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Catch 'Ya in a Lie

5/11/2014

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I’m going to talk about craft as applies to writing. First you need to remember the rules—write something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and make sure of your spelling.

I love getting opportunities to tell people to do what I don’t quite do myself. Yesterday I sent the misspelt word ‘enabalers’ to a group of writers, who admired my courage. Some even knew what I meant, mainly because I was talking about them being enabalers, which enabaled me to feel better about myself not getting the spelling right.

When I talk about the rules of romance writing, I’m sort of exaggerating because as far as I’m concerned, the only rule is that the couple has to have a satisfactory ending together. The story line is to have two people, find a reason to keep them apart, and use the rest of the words getting them together.

However, when I was learner writer and had available at the end of my typing fingers a group of very generous published authors, like the other unpubs I wanted to know what the formula was. The pubs said there isn’t one. Finally, under pressure, one famous author said okay, she would give her formula. I’ve never forgotten and I use it shamelessly.

She said to make sure the hero did something nice for the heroine (or the SO) very early in the book. I don’t remember anyone but me being impressed by that. They all thought it was just a way to stop us nagging. But it works. That’s how my husband won me.

I lived in a newly built hospital flat in Carlton with another pupil midwife. I’m pretty handy. I had bought some furniture at St Vincent’s Op Shop, reupholstered chairs, painted tables, etc, but I had no way of getting the curtain rod up. Naturally my flatmate and I weren’t about to spend any real money. So, ah yes, I didn’t tell this story back when I was explaining why my husband was a hero.

I met him at a ball, wasn’t impressed, but apparently talked to him anyway. It seems the midwife he had taken to the ball lived next door to me, so he popped around when she was working, knocked on her door (according to him) and when no one answered, he knocked on mine. He said he would wait for her. I said I didn’t know her shifts but it would probably be a long wait.

Heaven knows how he inveigled himself into my flat because I can’t remember, but as it turned out I was reading Catcher in the Rye before getting ready to go to work. My-gosh, he impressed me. He’d read it and he explained some of the tricky bits to me and we had an intellectual conversation the likes of which I’ve never had before with a man. I didn’t know any other man who read for recreation. Then he noticed the collapsed curtains and said no worries, he could put them up for me. He only lived down the road. Within half an hour he was back with tools and he put up the curtain. I think that might have been to make up for the fact that every word he’d said to me before that had been a lie.

He knew next-door wasn’t home. She’d been a volunteer date. He knew I lived next to her and was on night duty (he found out from the girlfriend of one of his housemates—small world sydrome) and therefore would probably be home when he called. He had never read Catcher in the Rye but he’d listened to his literary friends talking about the book and the minor points that puzzled them. He had a fantastic memory—genius memory. I didn’t know any of this until 20 years later when his friends had a get-together and as guys do, talked about the hilarious things they had done way back when. They all knew what he had done.

I couldn’t get a divorce after 20 years and two children together, and so I laughed like everyone else. Well. I was flattered. I thought meeting him was one of those amazing accidents of fate and I had written a story about it. I mean, what would be the odds of a random guy knocking on my random door having just finished the book that sat open on my coffee table? Clearly we were meant for each other.

I had to marry him to discover Catcher was the only recreational book he had ever read, and I had to be married to him for 20 years before I discovered that it wasn’t. (He only read tech books and autobiographies.) Also, that was the first time he had used tools, and the last time until I taught him how to use mine.

Real life is just like a story. Being nice early on works. That's real craft.


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    Virginia Taylor is an Australian writer of contemporary romantic comedy, romantic suspense, historical romance, short stories, and children's stories.  

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