Araña
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      I first became interested in dolls while looking for a mannequin to do studio photography. I have always admired Marlo Thomas, my idea of 'the average American girl-next-door". I wanted a model that looked similar to her.


RealDoll face 8 "Stephanie"

      I chose the name "Araña" from a sailing ship in my as-yet-unfinished novel (which might never get finished). Most of the time, sailing ships and smaller boats are named after women. This might be the only time a 'woman' was named after a ship!

      The story opens in October of 1989. George, the main protagonist, watches a spider crawling up a wall in his bedroom. His last conscious thought was of this spider and how it moved. He wished that he could walk up walls like that.

      In what he thought was a dream, George finds himself amongst the crew on the deck of a Spanish sailing ship in May of 1529. The Spanish sailors label George, "El Hombre Extraño Vestido" (The Strangely Dressed Man) and are fearful of his sudden appearance.

      An alien race, light years from Earth, has evolved beyond the need for corporeal bodies. This race finds it easier to communicate with intelligences that they encounter by choosing a physical form. One member of this race is "called" to the ship at this time by George. While George is still thinking about the spider, this alien reads his thoughts and mistakenly assumes the physical shape of a gigantic spider. (Oops!)

      The Spanish sailors panic and start yelling, "¡Araña!". The alien cannot hear the words, but does get the mental impression of the sound. {She} adopts this as {her} name while visiting the humans. As the story unfolds, the Captain renames his ship "Araña". This is how I came up with the name for this model!

      As is my custom, I sometimes revisit my old video games. One in particular is Arthur C. Clarke's 1997 game Rama. As some video games do, this one has some beautiful music that loops through while visiting certain areas of the game. I also search for *.mp3 files for these songs so that I can play them outside of the game engine.

      Charles Barth did the score for this game. I found the *.mp3 songs at Cruithne's web page. One of my favorites is "Octospider Area", which I think of as "Araña's Waltz". The song was written in 12:8 and only runs about a minute. The song plays out twice in the RAMA - Octospider Area.mp3 file.

      Clarke's Octospider is more octopus than spider, whereas Araña is entirely arachnid, but the music fits both characters.



      I discovered an error in Cruithne's filenames for at least two of the songs files that he (or she) offered. I originally downloaded the Zip file: RAMA_Music.zip which contained all of the *.mp3 files of the songs. The error was that the two files for Octospider Plaza (Formerly known as Octospider Area.) and Octospider Area (Formerly known as Unknown 01.) had their names transposed in the ZIP file.

      If you download and unzip the archive, right-click on the filename of the song "RAMA%20-%20Octospider%20Area.mp3", click Properties, then click on the Details tab, you will see the name "Octospider Plaza". Also if you right-click on the filename of the song "RAMA%20-%20Octospider%20Plaza.mp3", click Properties, then click on the Details tab, you will see the name "Octospider Area".

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