Eleanor of Aquitaine has brought a profound change in my life. She is my new Undo.

I am adjusting now to the smell of new electronic gadget. She hasn't replaced my olfactory affinity towards ink on bookpaper and freshly-dispensed tape, but she comes close very much like the scent of a lemon on the verge of ripening. A newly-opened box of Nokia smells just the same.

Then there is the adjustment between pulp and electrons--and voices. On a clear day, I'm friends with the TPB's: Karen Haber's Science Fiction: The Best of 2003 and Asimov's Foundation. Or James Patrick Kelly's The Best Christmas Ever and The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy audiobooks.

For those times when I have to seclude everything from my prude born-again Christian creationist homophobic New-Orleans-deserved-it-because-it's-gay carpool driver, particularly Anne Rice' The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty and a solitaire game (anything with cards would probably mean gambling to him), Eleanor is ready to lend her veil of discretion.

I think I am suffering from sequel fatigue after Rice. The novel is one big BDSM play--I am left with nothing on but a hard desire and not getting any in the end, ergo wanting for more which will come in the second installment, which will go on till the third. I hate her now more than ever when Interview with the Vampire and The Mummy or Ramses the Damned left me with sensual flatness. Every point in the curve is a climax that rising to a climactic climax is like pissing into the ocean. Not a bit up in the saltiness level. (But why am I coming back to Rice?)

Not reading The Garden of Rama in Clarke's The Rama Chronicles did not make a dent either when I topped it off with Rama Revealed. Monmouth may be right anyway. Like Gibson's Idoru, each sequel can very well stand on its own. But it doesn't make me grab the nearest 2/3 of Rice' Sleeping Beauty.

So I'm off to reading electronic shorts and anthologies starting with Philip K. Dick's The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories. Or standalones like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I've put on and off from the time I acquired Eleanor.

Interactive. A soon-to-be published spec fic was edited inside her, while a dragon fic and a slipstream are next in line. And so are selections for Warm Bodies 3, finishing touches on the way. Did I mention that she gives me space?

4GB oh boy I could marry her.

This entry was posted by sky, on Thursday, October 06, 2005. You can leave your response.