Murderdollbot

I'm rereading the four novellas of the Murderbot Diaries because

1. I love them and want to think about what and why I do, and

2. I don't remember very well what happens overall--or even, I admit, some scenes at all––even though I read them just a few weeks ago.
Is it because the story (it's one extended story) takes place in space stations and alien planets, and it's hard for me to imagine the settings well enough to inscribe them in my brain?

Or because my memory's slipping? (It is, a little.)

Or is it just that I've always been a lazy reader who skips details (like the plot) in favor of the characters' feelings, and I couldn't have told you exactly what happened in LOTR when I first read it with my fresh brain at fifteen either (but I still remember how I felt about it)?

All of the above, I think.

As an exercise in paying deliberate attention, and because I'm loving the stories so much I want to spend more time with them, I decided to outline the plot.

I want to make some scenes visible too.
How? Sketch a storyboard?

I decided to use a girlette to act out the very first scene:
Murderbot rescues a couple humans from a giant, tunneling alien animal.

Spike the girlette said she should be Murderbot because she has short hair like it does.
This morning, she got suited up.
She borrowed a helmet from Kelvin the Cosmonaut (the blue doll behind her, which I bought on eBay from someone who got him in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s).
Kelvin's helmet is dimmed with age, but Murderbot's helmet is completely opaque, so that's fine.

Her armor is reflective-foil insulation leftover from curtains HouseMate is making, and foil tape.
It took me hours--futzy because Spikebot's joints have to move--which is why I didn't get around to the alien animal.

I'm pleased:

Being a frightening security unit, Murderbot would not be not cute like a girlette. I masked Spike's smile with a band-aid. 

I thought about changing her skin tone too. Murderbot says it has a generic human face, which I figured would be a soft brown color.

Did you see a few years back the photographer, Angélica Dass, who matched thousands of people's skin tones (from their noses) to Pantone colors for her project Humanae?
Here are just a few:

I looked up how to change the color of a plastic doll.
Not easy to do. Plastic is not just one thing, to begin with. If you try something permanent, like Rit dye, and it doesn't work, you've wrecked your doll.

Some doll-change artists use chalk pastels, so I tried that (without using a fixative, so I could wash it off)--here, below.
Oh, dear. It looked like blackface--entirely NOT the look I want.
(A happier association, though, is that she looks like Pigpen from Charlie Brown.)

Oh well. Better to leave her as is---it's not like Spike really looks like the character anyway.
Murderbot wears its armor in a couple other important scenes, if I want to try to photograph those.
I don't know that I will though.
It's fun to use girlettes, but they don't reeeeally match the darkness of Murderbot. Not its dark skin, its dark story.