VP Profile #7: Ferrett Steinmetz

Probably our highest profile member of VP XIII, I'm pleased to present an interview with the bi-shop-xual Ferrett Steinmetz.

You should totally read the interesting, in-depth interview, but if you just want to pop to the fiction, I'll make that easy on you.

Tamago: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Ferrett: In fourth grade. I submitted my first poem to a teacher, which included the phrase “In a time / when people live with the spider of hunger in their bellies,” and she thought that was the most amazing thing. I said, “Wow, if I can inspire that reaction, then I want to write!”

Which, to me, is largely what writing is about: inspiring reaction. Can I make you cry? Feel outrage? Root for this character? If I can get you hooked, then I have affected you without even being there. That’s a win, man.

What’s not a win? My poetry. “Spider of hunger”? Come on, fourth grade kid, you can do better than that.

Tamago: Are there any kinds of stories you are more inclined to write, or themes that you return to in your writing?

Ferrett: Pretty much all my best work could be summed up in one title: Desperate People Locked In Strange Rooms. Whether it’s a squid trapped in a moat created for him by a mad Scientist (“As Below, So Above”) or a teenager trapped in a world that records and ranks his every behavior (“Camera Obscured”) or a jock trapped in a school of mad scientists (“Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol”), almost everything I write involves someone in a weird situation they didn’t create.

That said, I write a lot about time travel as a futile way of trying to fix the past (the idea of people using time travel as a video game save point is something that crops up in no less than three stories of mine). I also write a lot about how the singularity is probably going to be a wretched mess of advertising hell for people.

That said, my wife actually put a lock on me for 2010: “No more stories about teenagers learning life’s lessons!” (This culminated just after I’d written “In The Garden of Rust and Salt,” which is perhaps my most depressing tale ever.)

Tamago: You have a fairly popular blog. Why do you keep a blog, and what will readers find you writing about there?

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.