Anna McCarthy\u2019s book \u2018Message in a Bottle, A Magical Journey\u2019 of hope is up for an award<\/p>\n
Writing children\u2019s books wasn\u2019t Anna McCarthy\u2019s first path in life. The language teacher stumbled upon becoming an author through making up rhymes with her son at bedtime. She comes from a musical background and that structure had always been in the back of her mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was nothing I ever wanted to do. I\u2019ve met loads of people that are authors because that\u2019s what they always wanted to pursue. That was not the case for me at all. I actually hated English classes at school,\u201d shared McCarthy.<\/p>\n
From the time her\u00a0now 15-year old son was tiny, they had played with words and making rhymes and rhythms with words.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c(We) would find words that are similar and different. It\u2019s just been something we\u2019ve always done. Especially with his bedtime. We would read books. We would play around with making up rhymes and just have a giggle with it. When you look at the types of books I write, that has always been my practice\u201d<\/p>\n
Writing children\u2019s books came to her when a lot of new ventures came to people – during the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to go on walks and one day I was thinking about another children\u2019s book that was a favourite of my nephews and it\u2019s about two animals. It\u2019s a rhyming book and I just had these crazy thoughts about how different that book would have been if she (had) chosen two different animals and the rhymes that would have come from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
This kick started McCarthy\u2019s creative process as she begun brainstorming different animal pairs and playing around with what they would do in various rhyming schemes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to see what would happen with (a) giraffe and my first book kind of came from that silly idea on my walk. By the time I got home, I had about five verses in my head and I read them to my family and they\u2019re like \u2018this is actually really good, you should do something with this.\u2019 So that\u2019s where it began and then I wrote about six books over the course of a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCarthy continued to think over the books in her head and eventually decided to pursue publishing them. This was no easy process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI reached out to editors – I spent 11 months trying to find an illustrator because I can\u2019t draw and no one would want that work and then it went from there. It\u2019s been incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book, Message in a Bottle, A Magical Journey of Hope\u00a0came out this year, illustrated by another Vancouver Island resident, Nicola North, and is now a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Awards. It is McCarthy\u2019s second published book.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about a magical enchanted bottle and a girl who has a vision of environmental stewardship and a vision of healing our world. She takes this magical bottle and sets it out to sea and this bottle travels around and sees all these beautiful things and kind of captures them inside itself. It also starts to see some of the effects of the damage we\u2019re doing (to the environment) and captures all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bottle takes a journey around the world and is picked up by various people who open the cork and see both the good and bad and realize they need to clear up environmental messes but also change the way they do things. Once the bottle is satisfied that it has done its job of delivering the message, it moves on to the next person.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt goes around the world, spreading this message that we need to do something. When we all do that, some big changes happen and once the bottle is satisfied that it\u2019s done its job, it ends up in this beautiful, idyllic place.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCarthy already has a Christmas book on the horizon, currently in the editing process, about the 12 days of Christmas, Vancouver Island style.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 12 things from Vancouver Island and the first one is afternoon tea at the Empress,\u201d previews McCarthy.<\/p>\n
The winner of the Whistler Independent Book Awards will be announced at the conference at the end of October.\u00a0<\/p>\n
McCarthy\u2019s books can be found locally at Laughing Oyster, Blue Heron, Smol Store, Books4Brains, Bean Around the World cafe, TinTown Cafe and Podlings. They are also available for purchase through her website, www.annamccarthybooks.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anna McCarthy\u2019s book \u2018Message in a Bottle, A Magical Journey\u2019 of hope is up for an award Writing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-471705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115311603224361498","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}