Impressive mix of practicality, humour and inspiration - Rated 
Billed as 'A practical course in career design for artists, innovators, and others aspiring to a creative life', there's a clear message right from the start that creativity can take a vast number of different forms. Simply assigning someone the label of 'creative' is a serious generalisation. Your version of creativity might be making art, teaching, generating ideas, inventing objects, interpreting music..... and Carol Lloyd is most helpful in encouraging you to understand your own unique brand of creativity.
The book begins with a section somewhat similar to Julia Cameron's Artist's Way programme - a process of search and research through your childhood desires, your timeless inclinations and present needs. From there it goes considerably further into the dreaming, planning and design stages for a new way of living. And on into the development of a down-to-earth action plan for your day-to-day life.
There's a chapter on the various kinds of day jobs which can support or undermine your long-term creative goals. Another on how to deal with indecision and competing interests. And one that asks you to analyze your current lifestyle and build a new model for your everyday creative process.
As a self-coaching tool this book is superb. I have learned much from it to enhance the life/creativity coaching that I do. So if you want to redesign your life in a way that will support and inspire your creativity, this is the one for you.
The Real Artist's Way - Rated 
This is the book that Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way should have been - for me. I found the latter helpful only in that it was a wistful stroll through What It's Like To Be An Artist, complete with a level of tenuous, airy-fairy metaphor that just became annoying. In contrast, Lloyd's book is down-to-earth and useful. Thank Elvis, this book actually gave me the practical details I need to build a life around my costume art.
Unlike the obligation to write, write, write displayed in Cameron's writer-biased exercises, Creating A Life Worth Living gives a series of options appealing to all kinds of artists. Exercises can be completed by a whole range of methods geared towards the visual artist as well as the logical, listmaking type, the spacial thinker and so on. The reader is encouraged to pick the method that appeals. And that summarises the whole feel of the book; it allows you to be one of a diverse range of creative types, or a hybrid of more than one, leaving the reader feeling freer and more validated. Whilst reading The Artist's Way I felt that I was walking a line, trying to keep up and stay with the program, this book was a much more expansive exploration - a romp through fields rather than a straight and narrow written path. And I dare say that even the writer would be well served by this more open approach.
Chapters are readable and fun, rather than the poetic treacle one must wade through in Cameron's book. They are relevant to our experience, giving us a practical framework within which to plan a career or a project and then build it from foundations to roof. The author uncannily reads back to us our own experience, making the reader wonder whether CCTV has been installed in one's house. Most fascinating and valuable of all are the interviews with successful artists, spread through the book, that ask all the questions you really want to know about - do you work from 9 till 5, or through the night? What does a day involve? Was success a struggle and then a big break for you, or something else? Do you trick yourself into working when you don't want to, or do you let it go and take a day off?
If you've read The Artist's Way in the hope of finding a real, treadable path through the life of an artist and were disappointed, I would say most emphatically that this is the book for you.
Fantastically useful for anyone who thinks creatively - Rated
As an artist, I've found this book invaluable in helping me redefine my practise. It tackles nitty gritty subjects such as how to make a living whilst you're becoming established as an artist (actor/dancer/writer/inventor etc) as well as delving into the more mysterious areas of how and why we actually create. A really useful (and funny!) resource which should be on every bohemian Christmas list this year.
The quotes and interviews alone are worth the price: - Rated
Carol tells us "I discovered . . . . that I instinctively knew how to help [creative people]clarify what they wanted, navigate the vague terrain between vision and real life, and arrive at practical solutions." She is clearly gifted, and not only as a well-read writer and a counselor for those of us crying (for whatever reason) for creative focus. Buy this book if you have become serious about facing and dissolving your fears and blocks to the long and winding road of your unique creative happiness and life worth living.
A Lifesaver. - Rated
This is a book for anyone looking for focus. It keeps you grounded while letting your imagination soar. It's what you need. Trust me.
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