Kim Little

On romance, ADHD, twenty years of writing fiction online, and the power of a good gingerbread syrup.

By Kim Little  ·  With Kim Little

The best way to deal with being self-conscious when talking about yourself is to pretend it’s not really you. Hence this pretentious little pretence of a magazine profile — written by Kim, about Kim, for Kim, in a room that doesn’t exist yet. Hopefully it’s as entertaining as it is informative. If nothing else, the gingerbread syrup is real.

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Kim Little is a contemporary romance writer based in Brisbane, Australia. They live with their partner and two children in a house with too many books and not enough shelf space.

Kim spent years living and working in Japan, and the experience reshaped far more than their writing. Speaking multiple languages changes the way you think about communication itself — what gets said, what gets implied, and everything that lives in the gap between the two. Decades of working across cultures, in education and beyond, have given Kim an instinct for the way people perform, conceal, and reveal themselves differently depending on who they’re talking to. Their characters tend to carry that same complexity.

As a language teacher, Kim has spent years making up stories — sample sentences, paragraphs, whole scenarios for classroom materials. Romance, it turns out, is a more enjoyable and significantly more complex version of the same impulse.

Kim is an incurable romantic. They used to think they were tragic, but a late diagnosis of ADHD in their forties has begun to reframe the big feelings and grand ideas — not as a flaw, but as something closer to wiring. Literally incurable. Perhaps writing romance is a subconscious effort to rewrite their youth the way they wish it had gone.

When they’re not writing, Kim gardens, reads, and listens to music — they own far too much Enya and an unreasonable number of different recordings of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

· · ·

I meet Kim in the work room of their hillside house, nestled in the Gold Coast hinterland. It’s not clear whether Kim is a he or a she, and they don’t volunteer the information. Gabled windows sit between full-height bookshelves overflowing with paperbacks in English and Japanese, spines cracked and dog-eared, and what appears to be an entire shelf of Harlequins that Kim makes no effort to hide. The room is dominated by a massive desk hewn from a live-edged slab of Tasmanian oak. In front of it sit a facing pair of deep sofas, cushions and throw blankets piled into the corners in a way that suggests they migrate but never leave.

The desk and the low coffee table — matching, of course — are covered in a thickening layer of annotated hardcopy drafts, books in various stages of reading progress, and notebooks filled with project diaries and story bibles. “Too many ideas,” Kim explains, unprompted. “I have to dump them out, otherwise they fight for dominance.”

The relatively flat surfaces are dotted haphazardly with empty coffee cups — each from a different Japanese city, a Starbucks souvenir haul collected across years of travel. The lighting is subdued but comfortable, the room illuminated indirectly from outside through the deep-set bookshelves, which funnel afternoon light into the space. A smattering of Turkish desk lamps — pendant mosaics of blue, aquamarine, and amethyst — add to the soft glow. “I hate the big light,” Kim says, gesturing to the ceiling where a single utilitarian fixture is resolutely dark. It explains quite a lot, actually.

A set of Yamaha studio monitors from the 1980s perch on a high shelf, and the strains of Enya fill the silences of our conversation. There are a lot of silences. They don’t seem to bother Kim.

Kim offers me a coffee — served with homemade gingerbread coffee syrup. I am not given the option of declining the syrup, though I do get a choice of milk. Regular or lactose free. Kim has learned that once you get to a certain age, you only get one flat white a week with regular milk unless you like to live dangerously.

You interviewed yourself. You know that’s strange.

Kim settles into the sofa opposite and tucks a leg underneath them.

“Completely strange. But debut authors don’t have journalists lining up, and I figured I’d at least ask myself the questions I’d actually want to answer.” A pause. “Think of it as reflective practice. I am a teacher, after all. And I’m used to having conversations in my head — I usually pretend they’re between two different fictional people, so this is much more straightforward.”

Why romance?

“Because I’m a romantic. That’s the honest answer.” They say this without hesitation, like it’s been waiting. “I feel things in a big, consuming, probably-diagnosable way, and love stories are the form that makes sense of that. Romance demands characters who want something badly and have to risk something real to get it. Writing that well is harder than people think.”Kim reaches for a coffee cup, finds it empty, puts it back.

“There’s a perception that romance is formulaic or light. I’d push back on that. The stories I want to write sit somewhere between literary fiction and genre — accessible, but emotionally precise. I want the reader to feel something shift.”

What shaped you as a writer?

Kim exhales slowly, as though deciding where to start. “I was hyperlexic. My kindergarten teacher — first year of grade school in New South Wales — told my parents there wasn’t much for me in that first year because I could already read, so I was left with the graded readers a lot. It’s not a brag, it’s just what happened. I was reading the Narnia books by the end of first grade. Babysitters Club. Roald Dahl. Later Tolkein. We moved a lot, and tracking a series between schools was how I held onto continuity.”

“The upshot is I ended up reading older than age-appropriate stuff pretty early — and certainly didn’t understand chunks of it at the time. I got into Ian Fleming’s Bond books in my early teens, and got busted reading Michael Blodgett’s Captain Blood in the town library when I was in fifth grade.” They almost laugh. “Christopher Pike, Stephen Lawhead — all of that was happening at the same time.”

They lean back. “Fleming is a genuinely tight writer. Every Bond girl has flawless breasts but also a single serious physical flaw — not because he hates women, but because it’s as though he’s decided they can’t be perfect, so he gives them something to offset how beautiful he’s written them. It’s a strange, deliberate craft choice and I found it fascinating.”

“Then in ’96, SBS started broadcasting anime in Australia. We were living in regional Australia, so suddenly we had the nation’s multicultural broadcaster beaming in foreign films and animation late on a Friday or Saturday night. Evangelion used to air on a Wednesday night, I think. That was the kicker — it launched everything else. The anime versions of Love Hina and Kanon got me into the manga, which got me into the original visual novel versions of Kanon and Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. And it branched out into shōjo manga — Cardcaptor Sakura, Marmalade Boy, which is basically enemies-to-lovers before anyone called it that, Maria-sama ga Miteru. These were telling childhood-friends-to-lovers stories with real psychological weight.”

“Harry Potter hit around the same time, and then obviously the fanfiction. And throughout that whole period, black label Harlequins.” A glance toward the shelf. “Reading a paperback and letting your mind’s eye run wild was much easier to get away with on the bus or train than skin mags. And you can hide paperbacks on a shelf in pretty much plain sight.”

“I’ve been writing fiction for over twenty years. I’m not new to this — I’m new to publishing.”

“The Japanese writers came when I was living in Japan. I’m not a Murakami fan — I tried two books in English and another in Japanese and the absence of actual plot does nothing for me. All ennui and navel-gazing.” They wave a hand. “But Yoshimoto Banana has a way of taking everyday places and filling them with seemingly normal people who have the most bent internal monologues and stories. Very interesting.”

“And recently I’ve been reading Endō Shūsaku — amazing stories of people with historical grounding, and such internal examination. Characters grappling with shame, conflicting desires, weakness of flesh but strength of faith. Extraordinary writing.”Kim is quiet for a moment.

“Shinkai came later — late 2000s into the 2010s. Your Name, Weathering With You, Suzume. He’s spoken at length about the impact of visiting Tōhoku after the tsunami on his work, and the area I lived and worked in was directly hit in March 2011. I lost past students and colleagues. I watched the tsunami roll in over my old hometown live on television from Australia, from an NHK helicopter.”They stop. Enya plays.

“I visited six months later and I was lost. The coastal part of the town had been scraped clean and I couldn’t get my bearings. I got vertigo trying to process it — physically vomited. And then immediately felt awful for having such a weak reaction in front of my friend who’d worked in the town hall. She’d spent two weeks serving emergency rations at one of the sports centres turned emergency shelters, and then been assigned the task of interviewing survivors with no surviving family members to ascertain their eligibility for benefits. She did that for four months.”A long pause.

“Shinkai’s work after 2011 carries something I recognise. Distance, loss, the desperate need to reach someone. That resonates differently when you’ve stood where those stories come from.”Kim shifts the conversation deliberately.

“I started posting on StoriesOnline around 2015 — a short story in progress that ended up taking seven years of sporadic bursts to complete publicly. Then I wrote a collection of Japanese internet confessions — more explicit vignettes with shorthand characters, based on Japanese anonymous confession forums. In 2024 I pulled the novel down, planning to rewrite it properly, but then decided a collection of shorts was a better way to learn the self-publishing workflow. Now I have this collection coming out, that original novel in penultimate draft, and two other books in various stages of sketching.”

Your debut collection is set in Japan. How autobiographical is it?

“The settings are real — I’ve lived in or visited most of the places in the book. The emotions are real. The characters are invented, but they’re built from things I’ve observed and felt over a long time.” Kim turns a draft page over on the coffee table, absently, as though tidying and then forgetting halfway through. “I’d call it emotionally autobiographical without being literally autobiographical.”

You speak Japanese fluently and you’ve spent years working across cultures. How does that show up in the writing?

Kim sits with this one for a moment.

“Multilingualism changes the way you experience language. Not just vocabulary — the whole architecture of how you communicate. Japanese is a high-context language. So much is conveyed through what isn’t said — through register, through silence, through the space you leave for the other person. English doesn’t work that way. It’s blunt by comparison.” They smile. “I spend a lot of time trying to get English prose to do the things that Japanese does effortlessly with a pause.”

“And decades of working with people from around the world — in classrooms, in international education — that’s changed how I think about characters. People don’t perform the same self everywhere. The version of someone you get depends on the language, the context, the power dynamic. I’m interested in characters who carry that complexity.”

What’s the writing process like?

“I write on my phone, in my email drafts, on my computer at home, and endlessly in my head.” Kim taps their temple. “The writing never really stops. It just doesn’t always make it onto a screen.”They reach for another coffee cup. Also empty.

“My biggest challenge is that once I’ve fully plotted a story out in my head, I can lose interest before the first draft is on paper. The thing feels done internally, and convincing myself to do the mechanical work of actually writing it down is where ADHD makes itself inconvenient. That’s one of the reasons it’s taken me this long to publish. I have novels at various stages that have been ‘nearly finished’ for years.”A pause. Enya fills it.

“Getting this collection across the line was partly about proving to myself that something can actually get finished. When I do write, it comes in bursts — nothing for weeks, then an evening where thousands of words appear almost fully formed because I’ve been composing them in my head the whole time I wasn’t at a keyboard. I used to feel guilty about the gaps. I don’t anymore.”

“I’m constantly trying to improve my writing and self-editing, but at some point you have to stop, let the work breathe, and eventually pull the trigger and let the world see it.”

You were diagnosed with ADHD in your forties. How has that changed things?

“The diagnosis came at the right time.” Kim says this carefully, as though they’ve thought about the phrasing before. “It let me realise there’s a method to how my brain works. The medication gave me more consistency in accessing a lifetime of strategies I’d already developed to overcome what I thought were character flaws. It allowed me to put a name to fear of failure and rejection — RSD — and begin to appreciate the gift parts of being neurodivergent.” A beat. “And put a name to the shit parts.”

“I’m an incurable romantic. I used to think I was tragic. The diagnosis reframed that. Not as pathology. As wiring. Literally incurable.”

“Perhaps writing romance is a subconscious effort to rewrite my youth the way I wish it had gone. I’m not sure. But the stories I’m drawn to — people who almost miss each other, who take the long way round to saying what they mean — those feel connected to something personal.”

As a language teacher, you’ve been making up stories for years. How does that connect?

“Oh, directly. Sample sentences, paragraphs, classroom materials — I’ve been inventing characters and scenarios professionally for over fifteen years. The difference is that romance is more enjoyable and significantly more complex.” They pause. “Also, nobody in a textbook dialogue has ever had to confess their feelings at a train station in the rain. That’s a missed opportunity, honestly.”

You’re a faceless and voiceless author on social media. What’s that like?

Kim grins for the first time in the conversation.

“It’s a creative challenge I’ve come to enjoy. I can’t show my face or use my voice — it’s not professionally aligned with my career as a teacher. So everything has to work through text, visuals, and editing.” They lean back. “I’d slap so hard if I could do talking-head content. But the constraint forces the writing and creativity to speak for itself, which is probably more honest anyway.”

What do you want readers to take away from your work?

The grin fades to something quieter.

“I want them to feel seen. I write about people who overthink, who hold back, who love quietly and fiercely. If someone reads one of my stories and thinks oh, that’s me —” Kim stops. “That’s everything.”

What’s next?

“Another book. Different setting, bigger story, same interest in what happens when two people stop pretending they don’t need each other.” They look toward the desk — the drafts, the notebooks, the cups. “I’ll share more when I’m ready.”

Kim offers me another coffee. I accept.

The gingerbread syrup, it turns out, is exceptional.