Name: Kylie Rodier
Age: Old enough to be in a quarter-life crisis. Or is that too coy and millennial?
Hometown: Munich, Germany; Brisbane, Australia; London, UK. My family traveled.
Occupation: XML Content Specialist. I do stuff with code in content management.
When/where do you write? I write in my spare time, mostly evenings and weekends. One day, when I am a Responsible Adult, I will have my own dedicated workroom, with plants and a library and my laptop and a fully-stocked bar. Until that day arrives, I write in my bedroom and on trains.
Writing background: I started writing stories when I was 11. I’m collaborating right now on a web-comic with an illustrator friend and have a fantasy trilogy on the backburner. I have also written copy for websites and articles for university publications.
Why NaNoWriMo and why now? Wrimo is great for pushing out a lot of content in a short amount of time. I’ve done Nanowrimo before and found it forced my inner editor out of the way. It’s very liberating. It also gives me a nice break from the longer stuff I work on; I find it refreshing once I'm used to the sleep deprivation. You can see my NaNoWriMo profile here.
Genre (of NaNoWriMo novel): General fiction. It features queer characters and themes, so I suppose the novel will qualify as queer fiction too.
The novel I want to write: Mira’s friend Andrei dies, leaving her a car, a list of people to visit, and the condition she takes his bereaved partner Jay with her. The people on the list are a mixed bag, including her exes and Jay’s exes. Cue a road trip featuring self-righteous hippies, tofu, ferrets, smug marrieds, and a lot of guilt.
Meet my main character: Mira, a fifty-something ecobiologist-turned-activist-turned-lecturer. You may or may not be surprised to know she's a long-time Guardian reader.
Have you done any planning? Yes, as this is what helped me finish last time. Believe me, planning is KEY. I brainstormed plot events and picked out the interesting ones. I’ve also mapped out the characters and their relationships and backstories, written lists of key themes and motifs/imagery, and a rough chapter-by-chapter breakdown of plot and key events with approximate word count allocations for each chapter. Yes, seriously.
Basically, I try to write the story without actually writing the story. This will prove its worth when it's 2.13am on day 20 and I'm trying to remember why my characters have ended up in Hong Kong, and wondering if a few thousand words about a delectable aside in a dim sum restaurant run by Triad members would really kill the plot.
Writing fears: That I’m rubbish and I’m the only one who can’t see it.
Writing hopes and dreams: That I’m not rubbish and someone will eventually validate that by publishing me!
Actually, I'd love to do the writing for a graphic novel or video game. Prose is where I'm most comfortable, but matching words to visuals can be really powerful storytelling. A graphic novel is something I definitely want to create some day.
Also, I'm free for Doctor Who episodes. Any time.
For more on NaNoWriMo & to follow our other writers, please take a look here.
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