E-mail Matt Jarpe at m.jarpe@comcast.net
Web design & programming by David Louis Edelman.
I am sorry to admit this, but I have failed to live the writer's life. Unable to hold down the series of random jobs that only belong together on a writer's resume (hey, the economy can only support so many chicken pluckers and night watchmen at jello mold factories) I stuck to my straight arrow path. I got my Bachelor's of Science degree from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Biology. I got a PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I did a three year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Jewish Medical Research Center in Denver. Then I got a job as a biochemist at a pharmaceutical company in 1998 and I've been doing that ever since.
I know. As a writer's resume, this is a pathetic display of single mindedness. Where did I expect to run into the zany characters that would later populate my stories? In the lab? Are you kidding? Where was I supposed to experience that Caulfieldesqe lack of direction? I had the whole thing mapped out from the first lecture in Bio 101.
Thing is, I never set out to be a writer. I had toyed with the idea in high school, but by then the science bug had its teeth in me too deep. Just imagine doing an experiment, getting the result, you find out something new. And for a few hours or a few days you are the only person in the world that knows that something (unless you whoop for joy when the result comes out and your labmates come over to see what's so exciting). It's hard to give up on that feeling, however infrequently it comes along.
So I didn't set out to be a writer, but I did write. Badly, at first. But I kept at it, got better. I wrote most of a fantasy novel (evil sorcerer saves peaceful kingdom, for a price) that was embarrassingly derivative of Stephen King. Then I managed to finish a movie script (serial killer vs. the Mafia) that was embarrassingly derivative of... well, nearly every thriller I've ever seen.
The script was bad, and had no chance of selling, but the important thing was that I finished it. It's easier when you only have to write the dialog. Finishing something felt good, so I tackled another novel while I was doing my postdoc. It was something I'd been kicking around for ten years or so, about a rock star with a tortured past who loses his bandmates one by one while on tour.
I finished that one, too. It's called RADIO FREEFALL, and, like my science career, that novel plodded a slow but fairly straight path towards its ultimate destiny.
On the way I met Michelle Morris (we met in the lab, arguing over the Coulter Counter) and got married in the Baltimore Courthouse in 1990. She doesn't read science fiction, but she reads my science fiction. We had a son in 2000 (we're doing all the important stuff at 10 year intervals). Sam is seven now, drawing comic books, playing Pokemon, and reading everything he can get his mitts on.
SF Revu has an interview with me where I discuss meat computers, grooming English Setters, and walking.