Children’s author Amelia McInerney recently returned to Canberra after years away, ready to plant roots with her young family and immerse herself in the local writing community. A humorous wordsmith, the mother-of-three has two publications under her belt and another five titles on the way – four this year and one in 2022. Next in line is My Bird, Bertie, illustrated by Shane McG, which had its Canberra launch at The Book Cow in Kingston last weekend. Amelia’s first career was in the medical field performing ultrasounds, but these days she finds it hard to believe there was ever a time when she wasn’t a writer.
4B pencils
When I start writing a picture book, I write by hand, in pencil. It has something to do with getting the ideas flowing. Anyway, I prefer soft lead pencils because they’re dark and bold and they glide easily across the page. Way fewer hand cramps with 4Bs.
My kneel-sit chair
Like a cat that follows the sun, I tend to write in many different places around the house. Even so, I spend a lot of time at my desk which is why I like to mix up my posture in my kneel-sit chair.
My yoga mat
Yoga fixes my body after all the writing and sitting around (see points 1 and 2) and unfortunately, is required despitethe buttery pencils and the ergonomic chair. In truth, I’d have a photo of a masseuse’s hands here instead of the mat, but alas, I did not have access to one at the time I was taking these photos, which is often the case, especially after forking out for the chair, and the real reason I do yoga.
My family
Unlike everything else on this list*, this ‘favourite thing’ does not enhance my level of physical comfort whatsoever. Still, they made the list and I’m lucky to have them – look how gorgeous my children are!
*List in no particular order.
The sliding doors on my minivan
While part of me will probably always be horrified that I drive a people-mover (see point 4), not a day goes by that the rest of me doesn’t rejoice over having three spacious rows of seating, a socially-distancing aisle down the middle (to help stop the spread of annoyance) and with three young children and an apparent focus on making myself comfortable, perhaps my most favourite thing of all: automatic sliding doors. They are life-changing. There’s two of them on the car and I very nearly listed them twice.
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