About
Hi! I'm Zachary Kai: 20-something, queer (he/him.)
I love reading, making things, learning, listening to music, and traveling. I write fiction about beautiful/broken people and a life in the stars.
Photo Credit: Roberto Pettinau
I refuse to die without making something useful.
If I choose one word to describe myself besides queer, it's 'generalist.' My many skills include:
- Amateur knitting in practice, advanced knitting in theory.
- Amateur gardening: repotting, watering, weeding.
- Backstage crewing for theatre productions: being a stagehand, bumping in/out, making props, microphone management, set construction, spiking, sound.
- Recipe improvisation: I can create a meal with anything you have in the fridge and pantry.
- Shoddy hand sewing.
Timeline
- 2015: First fiction story: fanfic for an obscure webcomic.
- 2017: First novel, NaNoWriMo: One Moonlit Night (58k words.)
- 2018: Entered the Jolley Prize. Second novel: Chrysanthemum Throne (72k words.)
- 2019: Entered the Jolley Prize again.
- 2020: Published my first book: the first of The Mara Files.
- 2021: Sought reviewers for The Mara Files. Started rewriting + expanding it.
- 2022: Finished rewriting Mara's Awakening. Emailed previous reviewers.
- 2023: Rewrote + published Mara's Choice. Published Mara's Reckoning.
- 2024: Republished The Mara Files as one novel. Began Don't Burn Too Bright.
Tidbits
- As long as I'm typing in text files, I'm happy.
- Adore the history, culture, and the art of making food. Still, I prefer subsisting on veggies, nuts, seeds, legumes, and tofu.
- Always listening to music. Despite listening to my favorite songs thousands of times, I hardly grow tired!
- I'm fluent in English and speak intermediate (mostly Mexican) Spanish.
- I alphabetize (almost) everything when organizing.
- Saw A New Hope in 2015 and it changed everything.
- Started sending letters, art, and ephemera to strangers in 2020, and I haven't stopped. Some of my dearest friends are penpals.
- The internet is my livelihood, friendships, joys, curiosities... Without it, who am I?
- Though I'm Australian, I write using American spelling, and British punctuation.
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