Day 20 – Favorite Kiss

It was insanely difficult to come up with an answer for this one, cos generally I don't pay any attention to such sappiness.

In the end I picked the only kiss I could remember, from Seasons of Mist, volume four of the Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. I'm not going to show the kiss itself here because, 1. I've lost my copies of Sandman one through six and 2. its rather graphic.

The kiss in question is between Lucifer (The Morningstar, The Adversary, The Great Serpent, Satan, Lord of Hell) and Mazikeen who is a demon and a daughter of Lilith. This kiss takes place as Lucifer is planning to close down Hell and quit his job as Satan. Mazikeen pledges her love and loyalty to him even though he is no longer her lord or master, to which he states "you may love me, if you wish" before kissing her goodbye and using her knife to cut off his wings. The reason I'd class the kiss as graphic is that Mazikeen (as a demon) is missing most of one side of her face. Literally her brain is exposed and you can see inside her mouth, which makes the image of her kissing the David Bowie-esque Lucifer very disturbing indeed. Here's a link to it in ummm... spanish I think.  You've been warned.

The relationship Lucifer has with Mazikeen is the closest he seems to get to genuine emotion in the Sandman books, and I always felt sorry for poor ugly Mazikeen for being left behind. Until The Kindly Ones at least, when its revealed that Lucifer is playing piano in a wine bar and Mazikeen is part of the staff. One up for the ugly girls :p

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 20 - Oh My God Listen To The Lyrics



It was so hard not to pick another JoCo song for this, but for such a sad song, with a such a depressing message, this always makes me giggle. Why? 3:40 to 3:46 that's why. Ah, Pete Steele, you're sadly missed.

Day 19 – Favorite Book Cover

I am so jealous of anyone who has any book from this special edition series . HINT. Please feel free to buy me any of these. Ahem. Anyway, this obnoxiously pink design is absolutely perfect for the Alice stories.

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 19 - Track to Seduce Someone To

I'm on a JoCo kick right now, but, well a giant golden submarine would work on me, and once again, Helena by the Misfits is probably still too weird.

Day 18 – Favorite Childhood Book

I switched around day 13 and day 18 when I realised that I already had an entry for favorite opening scene.

It's hard to chose a favorite childhood book because I wasn't really a booky kid when I was a child, though I was an extremely booky teenager. I thank Terry Pratchett and Anne McCaffery for that, though more their adult books than the ones aimed at kids. Amazing Maurice didn't come out until 2001 when I was at university and that was really the first kid centric Discworld book. I'd already read the rest of Discworld by then, working backwards from Soul Music in 1994. But there are Pratchett books outside of Discworld. The shockingly tragic Nation being the latest, Carpet People being the first.

For me however the Bromeliad/Nome series was my first taste of Pratchett, and the first time I found a book that really appealed to me. It was set in places I knew about - department stores, quarries and Kennedy Space Center (yeah, I was a geeky kid and one of the few in my class to be lucky enough to go to Florida regularly). Pratchett has a great way of making everyday things wonderful by changing your perspective, and seeing the world through the eyes of creatures a few inches high is perfect for that. Plus it has spaceships, and Concord. It will always be a regret of mine that now Concord is gone I'll never get to eat strange woobly pink stuff and look for Nomes under the seats.

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 18 - Track That Reminds You It's Gonna Be Alright



Normally songs like this just make me more depressed but I think the combination of JoCo's voice and the fact that this is about a real guy, who really did all these insane things, makes it all ok.

Day 17 – Favorite Short Story

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Ok so I've missed quite a few days of this. My excuse? Well Portal 2 came out. Then I dislocated my thumb. The first may have caused the second.

Anyway, my choice for this one has to be "The Color Out Of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft, the only genuinely scary story I've ever read. That link is to the full text. Go read it before you read any further. Or get the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company radio play version, its free in various places. A lot of the time you get the impression that Lovecraft isn't describing his monsters because he can't be bothered, isn't being paid enough or can't think of anything. All too often we get to the end of the book and end up with something like "never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw", and on those occasions that he does describe his monsters (for example the epically detailed description of Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror) they're weird but they aren't (in the age of cinema FX at least) actually very scary.

But the whole point of the "bad guys" in this story is that they don't have a form to describe. They literally are just a colour (from space). A colour which can't be described using human language as it doesn't exist in our visible spectrum, rather like Terry Pratchett's Octarine aka the colour of magic best described as a 'fluorescent greenish-yellow-purple'. and how do you fight a colour? Or a vapour, or a wasting disease as it ultimately becomes? Well, you can't, that's the point.

The story ends with a proper sense of dread on the cliffhanger, much better than Lovecraft's better know stories because the action takes place close to a populated area, rather than the polar icecaps or the Australian outback.

Even  Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 17 - Track That Opened You Up To A New Genre



I'm not a fan of hip hop but chap hop is so much more dignified :D

Day 16 – Favorite Collection of Poetry

This night
While I am dreaming
Searching for you
I have a message, but you're not sleeping
I wade through deep black waters, endless deserts
Turning my eyes away
From the criminals who seek to shame me

Meet me at the crossroads
Where we will come together
And nothing else will matter
From now until forever

These things
The only way I know to tell you
Whispered in the static
Screaming through the veil
Please say
The message came through
As intended
Code deciphered and recieved

I'm not a poetry person. I get the point of poetry but any real enjoyment I might have gotten out of it was burned away by the rubbish assigned in the GCSE syllabus. So for this one I'm choosing someone who is a poet but a musician and author as well. I own a copy of Ladies and Other Vicious Creatures by Donna Lynch, but I couldn't find it to photograph it, so this is part of an image by Steven Archer, the other half of the band Ego Likeness.

I love the universe Ego Likeness operate in, as twist and disturbing as it is. Its a place where reality and nightmare blend together until you don't know the one from the other, where the witches and demons are real and just might be you. I recommend that you read the madness that is Isabel Burning, and hear the darkness that is Breedless, marvel at the beauty of Luna Maris and maybe pick up some animal bones in resin whilst you're at it.

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 16 - Day 16 - Track That Describes You

Day 15 – Your “Comfort” Book

Hmmm most of the books I'd consider as "comfort" books have already been mentioned, so I'm going to go forthe books I turn to when I've had a long day and I'm too exhausted to concentrate on anything complicated or clever.

The Sookie Stackhouse (a.k.a Southern Vampire (a.k.a True Blood)) series by Charlaine Harris is neither complicated or clever. These are literary soap operas, the kind of books you can read in one sitting and never think about again. Fortunately the characters are just this side of one dimensional and some of the set pieces are imaginative enough to keep the reader entertained. This series treats the vampire mythos with some degree of respect whilst still letting the characters be flawed, both of which seem to be missing from Twilight. Sorry but I like vampires to be real vampires. Just like Dexter and Bones, the TV series that has been spawned by the Sookie Stackhouse books is wildly better than its source, which makes it all worthwhile in the end :)

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 15 - Track That You Wish Described You



Heh, I wish I looked that good, just so I could complain about it :p

Day 14 – Favorite Character In A Book

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I tend to get obsessed with characters more for the inspiration they represent than for their representation in the original book. As my name suggests I'm a huge fan of The Phantom of the Opera, but not for Gaston Leroux's original book, which lets face it, is completely terrible. I love Erik in all his forms, in versions official and fanfiction, from Susan Kay to Andrew Lloyd Webber via Brian De Palma, but I don't especially like his portrayal in the original book. Same goes for Dracula, whilst I appreciate the original book, I'd much rather have the Gary Oldman , Christopher Lee or Richard Roxburgh version.

So for this prompt I decided to choose Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series by J K Rowling, a character that I love as much in the original books, as for his portrayal in film and fanfiction. Saying that I originally only agreed to read the Harry Potter books because Snape is played by Alan Rickman, one of my very favourite actors.

I was a Snape fan before it turned out he was a good guy, he always struck me as the only sane and sensible teacher in the whole school, since he was the only one to react to Potters constant acts of near insanity with anything approaching the appropriate response. He was also in charge of the coolest of the four houses and taught the most awesome subject. By the end of the books he turns out to be the most powerful, and in many ways the most important, character in the whole series, without whom the entire endeavor would have failed with Harry's death at Quirrell's hands in the first book. And yet in the end, his life ends with the same sense of waste as when it was lived, with insufficient recognition and a pointless death for ridiculous reasons at the hands of a lunatic. He never even gets a funeral! It's all so depressingly tragic.

Even Better 30 Day Song Challenge - Day 14 - Track You Only Like For Its Sentimental Value