How to use this Page

Add a Comment

Universal Pictures has unveiled the final trailer for Jurassic World. The story for this film was inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Chris Pratt as Owen, Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire and swarms of dinosaurs.

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the director behind the Jurassic Park and The Lost World movies, served as the executive producer for this project. According to RollingStone.com, it will hit theaters on June 12th. Follow these links to watch the teaser trailer and the global trailer. (via CinemaBlend.com)

Add a Comment

Universal Pictures has unveiled an official global trailer for the Jurassic World film adaptation. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Chris Pratt as Owen, Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire, and swarms of dinosaurs.

This movie, inspired by Michael Crichton’s hit novel Jurassic Park, is scheduled to hit theaters on June 12, 2015. Click on this link to watch the teaser trailer. (via mashable.com)

Add a Comment

Some people say I’m a book pusher. I’m okay with that. I get impatient with friends when they still haven’t read that book I recommended at least A WEEK AGO, for heaven’s sake, so I just go online and send it to them. Pushy? Bossy? I will not apologize. People need to read certain books and yes, I do know what’s good for them.

Which is why I’m about to go full-on pushy once again, and not only recommend some books that you need to read RIGHT NOW to fulfill your need for kickass science fiction heroines, I’m also going to go the extra step of enforcing that by actually giving them away free to one lucky winner.

First, Diving Into the Wreck, part of the Diving Universe series by Hugo Award-winning science fiction author Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I’ve been a fan and student of Kris’s for about 13 years, and have always viewed her as a pretty badass woman and author in her own right. But she also writes amazingly complicated and strong women characters who are always so much fun to spend time with. Kris has generously offered to give the lucky winner a signed copy of the book. She also answered some interview questions for me that I’ll share below, so hang on. It’s always fun to hear how other writers think.

 

Second is Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, and if you were a fan of his Jurassic Park you may think you already know all there is to know about this sequel, but I think perhaps you don’t. Because the reason I’m pushing it is that it has one of my favorite heroines of all time, Sarah Harding, who is both scientist and never-say-die person-you-most-want-with-you-in-a-crisis, and I am so inspired by her intelligence and toughness I actually reread this book about twice a year just to pump myself up. I think once you’ve experienced Sarah Harding for yourself, you’ll be totally hooked, too.

 

Third is my own Parallelogram series. Why am I book-pushing my own series? Because I wrote it for a particular reason: to show two very different girls who are entirely kickass in their own separate ways. One is a scientific explorer, willing to try out all sorts of bizarre (and potentially hazardous) physics theories she’s come up with, and the other is a teen adventurer who has been raised by her very badass explorer grandmother to handle all sorts of physical risks with a cool head and a deep will to survive.

In my spare time I like to read a lot of true adventure books by real-life explorers, and I based the teenage adventurer Halli and her grandmother Ginny on two women explorers I really admire: Roz Savage, who rowed solo across the Atlantic (why not??), and Helen Thayer, who was the first person to ski solo and unsupported to the magnetic North Pole. When she was 50, by the way. So yeah, I think you should read Parallelogram for the same reason you should read the Rusch and Crichton books: because the girls and women in these books will entertain and inspire you.

I asked Kristine Kathryn Rusch a few questions about her own writing process and what inspires her to write the strong kinds of characters you’ll find in all of her work:

RB: What qualities do you admire in the heroine of your book Diving Into The Wreck? Did you write those qualities into her character on purpose, or did they develop over time on their own?

KKR: Boss is her own person. She only lets people call her Boss, and she won’t tell anyone her name, because it’s her business. What I love about Boss is that she is so secure in who she is. She knows what she can and cannot do, and she knows just how much she’s willing to tell/give in any situation. She admits when she’s wrong, and she analyzes everything. She’s very strong, but she also can be vulnerable.

My characters come fully formed, but they do reveal parts of themselves over time. Boss & I share a love of history, but she’s so much more adventurous than I am. She would go crazy in a room writing all day. I love it. I never add traits consciously. Subconsiously, who knows? I assume so. But the characters are real people to me, with their flaws and strengths, and that includes Boss.

RB: Who are some of your favorite kickass heroines in other people’s science fiction books and movies? What about them inspires you as a person and/or as a writer? (I’m a big fan of Ripley’s in the Alien series. When she’s rescuing the little girl Newt from the breeding area in Aliens and fighting off the queen alien and her posse–you’d better believe Ripley makes me want to be braver in real life.)

KKR: Favorite SF women. Honestly, that’s a tough one for me. Most of the sf I read is short fiction, and the characters are one-offs. None of the women in the stories I read rise to the level of favorite. I like Ripley–and she was inspiring to me–but is not someone who comes to mind easily.

In SF, my examples were always negative. For example, in Trek, I was so happy that Kathryn Janeway had her own ship. Then I saw the dang first episode, and when she was faced with a big issue that James T. Kirk could have solved in 45 minutes, she gave in, and made her crew suffer for **years**  I think most of the sf films/TV suffer from stupid women problems.

The strong women I read about appear in the mystery genre. I adore Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski. I used to love Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Malone, especially when I encountered her in the 1980s. The female lead detectives were unusual women, who did their own thing in a man’s world. They’re the inspiration for my sf heroines.

RB: This is a chicken-or-the-egg question: Do you give your characters some of your own kickass qualities of bravery, wisdom, compassion, etc.–or do you feel inspired as you write their stories to be more like them yourself?

KKR: LOL, Robin. I love that you think I have kickass qualities. I think my characters are more articulate than I am, smarter than I am, more adventurous than I am, and more courageous than I am. I am blunt and stubborn and difficult, and in my fiction, those qualities are virtues, so there’s some of me there. But these folks are not people I want to be: they’re people I want to meet.

RB: Which character of yours has changed you the most as a person? Why?

KKR: The character of mine who has changed me the most as a person is Smokey Dalton, from my Kris Nelscott mysteries. He’s an African-American detective in the late 1960s. He’s a true hero, in my opinion. But his situations are beyond difficult. I always put him in the middle of a historical situation, and then ask him to respond. Some of those historical situations–I keep thinking, if I were there, would I have had the courage to do what he did? Would I have known what to do? And the thing I admire most about Smokey: His world, horrid as it is, doesn’t break him. It makes him stronger. That has had a huge impact on me and my thinking and my writing.

RB: What do you prefer in your favorite heroines, whether it’s the ones you write, read, or watch: More stoic than compassionate, vice versa,or a particular ratio of both? (For me, 80% stoic, 20% compassionate.)

KKR: Compassion first. I quit reading a mystery series set in the Middle Ages because our heroine–a smart and active woman–had a baby, and then abandoned that baby to go on a crusade. Well, this is the Middle Ages, and yes, she might have done that historically, but it would take 2-3 years to return to that child, and there would be no guarantee that the child was safe or well cared for. So I quit reading right there. The woman was too selfish for me to read about. Stoic, yes. But willing to sacrifice someone she loved for her own ends. Not someone I want to read about.

RB: Bonus question: I know you’re a big fan of the time travel series OUTLANDER, as am I. (I just finished the fourth book. What a ride!) If you were in Claire’s position, catapulted back to 1745 Scotland, what skills would you want to bring to the mix? I love her medical knowledge–it’s such a huge asset. But is there some skill you’d find just as valuable?

KKR: Great question. I have a wide variety of historical knowledge and weird trivia. I know how to make a match for example, and I know how to sterilize a room (even back then) and I know what’ll happen when in most of the English-speaking world. So I like to think all of that will be beneficial. Knowing outspoken me, though, I’d probably be jailed as a witch and executed. I also know that I’d be panicked as hell about dying of something preventable, like the cold that has felled me this week in 2015. If it became an infection in 1745, I could die. And I’d probably worry about that more than anything (except the food, which–yuck!) So as you can tell, I’m probably too much of a worrier to time travel safely.

SPEAKING OF TIME TRAVEL …

Kris and I both have novels in the Time Travel Story Bundle, which is on sale for just two more weeks. Here’s your chance to score a whole bunch of great fiction at an incredibly low price. Don’t miss it!

And as soon as you buy the bundle, head on over to my GIVEAWAY PAGE and enter to win those three fabulous science fiction books! I push them because I love–the heroines in those books and you, Dear Readers. Enjoy!

Add a Comment

At the beginning of a new year, many people often make resolutions to follow a healthy diet. mental_floss compiled a list of the “favorite workday snacks” of nine different authors. Jurassic Park novelist Michael Crichton enjoyed ham sandwiches while We Are Pirates author Daniel Handler enjoys raw carrots.

The other seven writers include Agatha Christie, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Emily Dickinson, and H.P. Lovecraft. What do you think? Which snacks help you to stay focused while you’re writing?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

BookVibe has examined 80 million Twitter posts from the past 12 months. Quartz reports that the data shows that the most popular book on the Twittersphere is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

Green’s hit young adult novel was mentioned in 1.2 million tweets. The books that made it onto the top 10 list are a mix of recently published hit titles and classic icons of literature; several of them have inspired highly successful film adaptations.

According to the article, “recent research suggests that film adaptations of books have the ability to influence people to read, so while critics may bemoan the latest adaptation of a book for the silver screen, the halo effect does increase the book’s readership which, at the end of it all, is exactly what the author wants.” Below, we’ve featured the full top 10 list—what do you think?

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

Sir William Osler, the great physician and bibliophile, recommended that his students should have a non-medical bedside library that could be dipped in and out of profitably to create the well rounded physician. Some of the works mentioned by him, for example Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne is unlikely to be on most people’s reading lists today. There have been several recent initiatives in medical schools to encourage and promote the role of humanities in the education of tomorrow’s doctors. Literature and cinema has a role to play in making doctors more empathetic and understanding the human condition.

My idiosyncratic choice of books is as follows.

Firstly, I start with a work by the most respected physician of the twentieth century, Sir William Osler himself. The work I choose is Aeqanimitas, published in 1905 and is a collection of essays and addresses to medical students and nurses with essays ranging in title from “Doctor and Nurse,” “Teacher and Student,” “Nurse and Patient,” and “The Student Life”. They are as relevant today as the day they were penned with a prose style combining erudition and mastery of language rarely seen in practicing physicians. Osler was the subject of the great biography, written by the famous neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who was to win a Pulitzer prize for his efforts. (I am not including this biography on my list, however.)

Anton Chekhov is included in my list for his short stories ( he was also a successful playwright). Chekhov was a qualified Russian doctor who practiced throughout his literary career, saying medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. In addition to a cannon of short stories and plays, he was a great letter writer with the letters, written primarily while he traveled to the penal colony in Sakhalin. He was so moved by the inhumanity of the place, that these letters are considered to be some of his best. Chekhov succumbed to tuberculosis and died in 1904, aged only 44 years.

William Somerset Maugham, the great British storyteller was once described by a critic as a first rate writer of the second rank. Maugham suffered from club foot and was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, and St. Thomas’s hospital, London where he qualified as a doctor. His first novel Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897 describes his student experience of midwifery work among the slums of Lambeth led him to give up medicine and earn a living writing. He became a prolific author of novels, short stories, and plays. His autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage describes his medical student years at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Many of his stories and novels were turned into successful films.

Another medical student from the United Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital who never practiced as a doctor ( although he walked the wards of Guy’s Hospital and studied under the distinguished surgeon Astley Cooper), was John Keats, who lived a tragically short life, but became one of the greatest poets of the English language. His first poem “O Solitude,” published in The Examiner in 1816, laid the foundations of his legacy as a great British Romantic poet. Poems the first volume of Keats verse was not initially received with great enthusiasm, but today his legacy as a great poet is undisputed. Keats died, aged 25, of tuberculosis.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous North American nineteenth-century physician, poet and writer, and friend and biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, popularized the term “anaesthesia,” and invented the American stereoscope, or 3D picture viewer. Perhaps his best known work is The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table his 1858 work dealing with important philosophical issues about life.

In Britain over a century later, in 1971, the distinguished physician Richard Asher published a fine collection of essays, Richard Asher Talking Sense which showcase his brilliant wit, verbal agility and ability to debunk medical pomposity. His writings went on to influence a subsequent generation of medical writers.

In the United States, another great physician and essayist was Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon whose accessible 1994 work How We Die became one of the twentieth centuries great books on this important topic a discourse on man’s inevitably fate.

Two modern authors next. The popular American writer Michael Crichton was a physician and immunologist before becoming an immensely successful best-selling author of books like Five Patients, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, and Jurassic Park, which was of course turned into a very popular film by the American film director Stephen Spielberg.

Khaled Hosseini the Afghan-born American physician turned writer is a recent joiner of the club of physician-writers, having achieved great fame with his books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I suppose we must finally include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the Scottish physician and author. His stories of the sleuth Sherlock Holmes have given generations pleasure and entertainment, borne of the sharp eye of the masterful physician in Conan Doyle.

Heading image: Books. Public Domain via Pixabay

The post 10 medically-trained authors whose books all doctors should read appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

Universal Pictures has unleashed a new teaser trailer for Jurassic World. Thus far, it has drawn more than 3.6 million views on YouTube.

The video embedded above offers glimpses of Chris Pratt as Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire. This movie, inspired by Michael Crichton’s hit novel Jurassic Park, is scheduled to hit theaters on June 12, 2015. (via Vulture)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

I spent more than 20 years in book publishing, mostly as an editor, and one of the most vexing issues my colleagues and I always faced was the jacket — what image (if any) and what type to put on the outside of a book. During my career, I had the privilege of meeting and [...]

Add a Comment

HarperCollins will publish this November the novel Michael Crichton was working on when he died in 2008.

Described as a "high-concept thriller in the vein of Jurassic Park", Micro is co-written by Richard Preston. It follows a group of graduate students hired to work for a mysterious biotech company specialising in micro-robotics.

read more

Add a Comment

Here we have an elegant high five from the late Michael Crichton.



Michael wrote many evocative books and was a YA author to me because every teenager I've ever known has read his books. Let's just call it cross-over appeal. Anyway, Micahel wrote the Andromeda Strain, a book I read back in 1979 or so. This story is a riveting disaster, and, in a big way, it forever turned the alien invasion story up on a tippy corner.

Good stuff, folks, and an inspiration to me. I create description dense worlds because Mr. Crichton took the time to write complicated, fully-realized stories. I'm going to miss those "alien invasions" and "dinosaurs gone amok" moments -- really going to miss them.

Here are some most excellent journeying thoughts from Michael:

I think people put too much emphasis on the "idea" behind a story, anyway. First of all, there isn't just one idea in a story, there are lots of ideas. And second, an idea by itself isn't worth much until you do the work necessary to get it down on paper. And in the course of doing the writing, the idea often changes. It's similar to the difference between having an idea for a building, and actually constructing the building. The building often turns out differently from the original plan or intention.

Yah, pretty much. Creation is about the work. Real creators are putting in the hours and that's just the way it works.

Here's another little bit from Michael: I experience a lot of doubts when I am working; I never feel confident. About two hundred pages in, I decide the book's no good, and it was a mistake ever to begin it. And I think there is no way to fix it, and I am generally miserable…If I tell my friends about these concerns, they just say, "Oh, I'm sure you'll work it out." This is very irritating.

Ain't this the truth. I'm on page 215 of my WIP, and I can tell you, I'm thoroughly miserable. My friends are also sure I'm going to figure it out. This is also wholly irritating. LOL.

Last of all, think about attending the Seattle Kid-Lit Drink Night (I'm pretty sure that Douglas Adams would have been all in for an event like this)...

"Did you do Molly Blaisdell’s Golden Coffee Cup Challenge? NANOWRIMO? Did you make any kind of writing and/or illustrating goal in November?

If you hit the jackpot…if you plodded along…even if you didn’t take a single step…come to celebrate and hang out with your peers at our own Kidlit Drink Night! November 30th at Broadway Grill in Seattle (on Broadway in Capitol Hill, across from the QFC – 328-7000) at 5:30pm. Cash bar. Molly will be giving out the Golden Coffee Cup awards (Don't worry if you're from out of town, you don't have to be present to win.)"

Street parking is available, or you can park at QFC for a small parking fee (or get your ticket validated by making a purchase).

Questions? Go to Holly Cupala's blog or ask me. :) Hope to see you!

Add a Comment

Just did a lovely signing -- only about fifty people altogether, which meant that I got to talk to everyone and draw in their books, admire their tattoos and so forth. Really pleasant.



Thank you for all who voted. Consider me retired now from the Hottest Daddy Blogger and Blogitzer categories.

A fun cartoon of Michael Chabon and me at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/nov/06/comic-book-literature-unmasked-festival/. I like how sleepy I look and how wide-awake he looks. (It makes me a bit sad that I leave Las Vegas and then Michael arrives, and we miss each other this trip. He's one of the world's best people to chat to.)

An interview with me at The Scottish Book Trust: http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/

My friend-the-Emmy-award-winning-writer Michael Reaves talks about how much he hates me on his blog. But I'm linking to the whole blog, and not just that entry (it's called "Why I Hate Neil Gaiman" and is easy to find) because it's all fascinating: Michael is battling Parkinson's Disease, and talks about that, and about other things. http://waretheblog.blogspot.com/

...and here's a tidbit that may help unravel some of why I was in China in September. I don't know if that's a final title (probably not) and the second two books are probably going to be solidly based in this blog (on the theory that of the 1,212,333 words I've written since it began, some of them might be of interest to the world. I think one may be partly about writing) and in case people were wondering, it doesn't mean I'll now write three non-fiction books; it'll probably be a non-fiction, then an adult novel, then an all-ages book, then another non-fiction book...

And more on the subject from MTV: http://splashpage.mtv.com/2008/11/06/neil-gaimans-tells-of-his-adventures-in-china-with-a-monkey-on-his-back/

...

Michael Crichton is dead. I read and liked some of his books (mostly the pre-1980s ones), some of his movies, and the first season of ER; I don't have any real anecdotes or insight -- we chatted a few years ago at a Harper Collins party, I liked him and oh my god the man was tall. He towered above a room of authors as if we were children. Over at the Guardian Maxim Jakubowski pens a much better appreciation than that, although I knew what he meant when he said,

we once shared a lift in the Random House building in New York some 15 years ago, and I was too dumbstruck by his sheer height to even introduce myself as he had to bend over at 90 degrees to fit his frame into the elevator.

...

The Dave McKean "Mythical Creatures" stamps are slated for June of next year according to the Royal Mail website. (I wrote short-short-stories to accompany them.)

...

If you're in the UK you can listen to me reading on the audible.co.uk podcast (but not if you're not).

And Keplers video- interviewed me (while I signed books) and are giving away a Headstone...

Add a Comment