I can’t ride a bicycle. When I outgrew my tricycle I never graduated to a two-wheeler and by the time I finished primary school I was too embarrassed to use training wheels, so I never learned. When we did cycling for PE in high school I used to just wait for the rest of the class at the park gates and hope no one noticed that they’d never actually seen me on the bike track.
2. What is your nickname?
I’m sure I’ve had a few I don’t know about but the one people say to my face is Aims.
3. What is your greatest fear?
Slugs, snails and anything else in the gastropod family. There’s something about their sliminess and lack of legs that makes my stomach turn. I’m not alone, either, this phobia is so common that it has a name: molluscophobia!
4. Describe your writing style in ten words.
I try to be funny and honest. Sometimes I succeed.
5. Tell us five positive words that describe you as a writer.
Hardworking, optimistic, emotional, revise-aholic.
6. What book character would you be, and why?
Anne (with an ‘e’) Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, because she’s fearless and passionate, and because I’ve always wanted red hair.
7. If you could time travel, what year would you go to and why?
I’d go back to 1988 to tell my 15-year-old self that in a few years nothing that happened at school will matter, including exam results, unrequited crushes and fights with ‘friends’. And also that letting someone shave the side of your head with a blunt razor is a bad idea.
8. What would your ten-year-old self say to you now?
‘Geez, you’re old!’
9. Who is your greatest influence?
Judy Blume, the godmother of young adult fiction. That novels she wrote in the 1970s are still being reprinted is testimony to the fact that she absolutely nailed it.
10. What/who made you start writing?
Ms Atkinson, my Year 1 teacher and the first person to ever laugh out loud at one of my stories. I’ve been trying to make people laugh with my writing ever since.
11. What is your favourite word and why?
Foible, because it’s fun to say and because when you describe your bad habits as ‘foibles’ they don’t seem so terrible.
12. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. I re-read it at least once a year and it still makes me laugh as much as it did the first time it was read to me, in Year 6.
You can find out more about Aimee's books and writing at her blog, What She Said.
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