Julie K O'Toole
AUTHOR

Julie K O'Toole

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I just love to write; I always have. I am a pediatrician in Portland, Oregon who has specialized in the innovative care of children and youth with all conditions of disordered eating: anorexia nervosa and related illnesses as well as childhood obesity. I founded the Kartini Clinic. I wrote a book about these conditions for parents called Give Food A Chance. I am working on another. That's the professional me. The other me writes all kinds of fiction. Fiction is much, much more fun to write. I am republishing the book I wrote based on the lives of two women doctors during the war in Vietnam. It required a lot of research, which I love, but also a lot of enduring pain as I told the story of both sides of that terrible war. As a physician, I am used to seeing pain, but this was none-the-less pretty excruciating. I wrote The Tahitian Hat Club as a tribute to the beauty of the people of Hawaii and Samoa as I experienced them as a young doctor. It was loosely based on a killing that took place in the medical community when I worked there. I wrote The Popular Crowd (pre-teen novel) for my daughters when they were struggling with self-identity as 12-year-olds, before cell phones and iPads. Some issues are timeless. One day, listening to a discussion on social robots, the figure of Botboy, the ultimate social robot sprang to my mind. This book was published first by Perfectly Scientific Press, owned by the great scientist and cryptographer Richard Crandall. When he died I republished it on Amazon. Richard made me write an afterword addressing the scientific conundrums such an advanced robot would present for humanity, and so I did. I love the idea of Botboy, even as I am aware of the potential problems. I think you would love him too. Next, I turned my mind's eye to the concept of the genetic modification of humans. Melding our genes with those of other animal families seemed to present the most creative possibilities. I wrote Sanctuary: the Melding of the Creatures. It was incredibly fun and the characters began to write themselves. I had it turned into an audiobook as that is the format my husband Steve most loves. It was exciting to choose a narrator (Christopher Dickins) from another country (the UK) with just the voice I heard in my head. What an adventure! So that's me: wife, mother, grandmother, physician, writer. Like all of you, I am a jumble of what I seem to be and those who have gone before me. My grandfather was a US Marine at the battle of Belleau Wood; my great-grandmother married when she was 13; my father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot and flew a Corsair; I was born in Utah and then raised in Palo Alto; I went to Reed College, the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, the University of Washington and finally medical school in Aachen, Germany. I trained in Hawaii; I worked in Samoa; I wrote, I wrote and I still write. Cheers!
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