Word: strainful
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...floor finishing an aria, she was out-stretched in order to breathe more freely. When she sang the jazzy "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," her breathy voice conveyed the song's suffering. Though Faithfull usually knows her range, holding a note sometimes produced a self-effacing strain in songs which require crackle...
...principal, not from interest, but just from words he thought up himself. His remuneration casts a consequential shadow, but the author isn't comfortable talking about it. He would sooner cogitate on those literary niggles--the charges that his characters have no depth. Back as far as The Andromeda Strain, Crichton concedes, he wasn't much for delving into character ("It didn't matter who the people were"). Still, he's human: criticism stings. "You know, I'm not very well read," he says, with characteristic self-effacement. "I was reading a book Cocteau wrote called The Difficulty of Being...
...editor of most of his early novels, Robert Gottlieb, confirms that. "What interested Michael was the scientific process and the excitement of the suspense," he says. "He had very dutifully filled in characters [in The Andromeda Strain]. I felt that the characters were getting in the way and that it should be stripped down even further toward being documentary in tone. When I told him this, it was already what he was thinking. We saw eye to eye from the start...
...earned by writing a shelf full of novels before he left college. Eight were paperback adventure novels written under the name John Lange, one was an Edgar Award-winning medical-detective paperback under the name Jeffrey Hudson, and another was the hardcover breakthrough under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was published as he worked out a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He says he produced 10,000 words a day during those years, and no one who knows his work habits disputes...
Michael Crichton didn't really have to get the science right to make sure The Lost World would be a best seller. But he got the science right anyway. Like many of his earlier novels--from The Andromeda Strain, his killer-bacteria thriller that prefigured The Hot Zone by 25 years, to Jurassic Park--The Lost World is suffused with scientific detail that has clearly been lifted from the latest research journals. Yet as a novelist Crichton isn't bound by the usual caveats that academics are forced to issue; he can and does take the most speculative of theories...