Featured Interview With Karl Steam
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in central Minnesota. I lived in Arizona and South Dakota briefly, but am now back to my home state.
I do not have any pets right now. A dog is my future, but definitely not a cat.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I was young my brother and I use to staple sheets of paper together to make books. Then we would cut pictures of animals from National Geographic magazines and paste them onto our pages. I only wrote nonfiction books about animals back then.
In 8th grade I tried to write a historical fiction novel, but gave up after 15 minutes. It was harder than I realized. I didn’t try to write another novel until college.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Gary Paulsen, Scott O’Dell, and Louis L’Amour are probably my most read authors.
As an adult I mostly read nonfiction books and articles. I like reading about history, sociology, and science. Fiction books must be really good to keep my attention. Lately, books by James Rollins have been fitting that criteria.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is Purple Pup, which is about some of the animals made by a company that is trying to be the world’s first major supplier of genetically modified pets.
The inspiration for Purple Pup came from reading an article about genetics. I had heard of genetic engineering before that, but thought scientists were just tweaking a few genes here and there. I didn’t realize that spider genes had been inserted into goat DNA, so that the goats would produce spider silk proteins in their milk, or that fish genes were placed into the DNA of tomatoes, in hopes of making the tomato plants more resistant to frost. Transgenetics was a lot more sophisticated than I realized.
It was learning about the successful creation of glow-in-the-dark cats that specifically inspired the story Purple Pup. I still remember looking at the article’s photograph of the glowing. At that point I sat back and realized, this is the future. More and more genetic engineering is going to take place and sooner or later people are going to want these modified animals as pets.
At first, I was going to take this concept and turn it into a picture book. After brainstorming it for a while I realized that there was too much material for a picture book to handle. At that point I started plotting a story about a child who discovers a secret laboratory where modified animals are being created, but that plot never felt right to me. Then I decided to write the story from the perspective of the animals. That’s when the story began to feel exciting and original.
Purple Pup is very much a character driven story. I had developed all the main characters and outlined a nice plot, but as the story was being written the characters took on personalities that I didn’t expect. (Possible Spoiler Alert) My storyline depended on two characters falling in love, but that never happened. Instead, an unexpected romance grew. I was forced to change everything to accommodate the way the characters were developing and ended up with a story that is better than anything I could have planned ahead of time.
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