Lindy Kato
I have been working through my Bucket List for decades after watching a bloke with neither arms nor legs ‘run’ a marathon to raise money for those less fortunate than himself. As a high school dropout who wouldn’t run for a bus, I needed a shift in attitude. Now I’m inspired to take up something new every time there is a zero on the end of my birthday. I’m an Ironman, a qualified nurse and science teacher, a doctor of genetics, and I have mental health experience from both sides of the fence. I’ve built two homes with my sweetheart and spent my 50th birthday at Mount Everest Base Camp with my youngest son. I’m looking to add to my science publications with memoir which are classed as auto ethnography, or a lived history, but I’m not sure about being called a relic. I’m looking forward to writing a biography through the eyes of one of my dogs. I live in our latest building project by the beach with my sweetheart and dogs.
What authors did you dislike at first, but grew into?
Apart from school, I never read anything but non-fiction. More recently I have had to read fiction for the requirements of the NorthTec Diploma in Creative writing and the results have been mixed. Catherine Chidgey, The Wish Child, I loved, Pet, I hated. Mostly I choose books because of the subject matter rather than the author.
Do you try more to be original, or to deliver to readers what they want?
As a scientist at heart, I can only write the truth as accurately as I am able. My act of defiance is to write in the first person, present tense, it’s like poking my tongue out at the formality of science writing. It therefore cannot be anything other than original. Someone will like it!
What is it about your chosen genre that you love?
I don’t need imagination for memoir, it already exists and bombards me on a daily (usually nightly) basis. Imagination is something I’m a bit short on. I take my hat off to fantasy writers, there’s no way I could do it.
If you had to do something differently as a child or teenager to become a better writer as an adult, what would you do?
Keep a diary! My memory is unusual, I know this for a fact because I’ve had enough concussions to have had a neuropsych assessment. My memory doesn’t work the same as in most people, but even so – I should have written more.
Have you Googled yourself? Did you find out anything interesting?
No, I don’t want to know.
Are there any secrets in your books that only a few people will find? Can you tell us one? Or give us any hints?
Everyone has a pseudonym, people I can trace (who aren’t dead) have chosen their own. I’m picking some readers will work it out.
Did you ever consider writing under a pseudonym? Why?
I DO write under a pseudonym and initially it was to protect the privacy of patients (dead or alive) as I describe real events in a Victorian asylum in my first book Desperate Times. It doesn’t matter so much for the second (or third) books in the series but I’ve maintained it for continuity.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
Bleak Expectations is with my editor (Lesley Marshall from Editline) and Acts of Defiance is with beta readers. My next project is the biography of my dog, Nudge, the most expensive mutt on the planet.