I'd forgotten about that one. We do have a collected Oscar Wilde somewhere in the house (we have books and bookshelves all over the place, as well as a whole load in the attic), but it's been ages since I read it. So I can't say if that might also have been some kind of subliminal influence. I think I came fairly late to Wilde but The Happy Prince may well have been somewhere in my childhood collection. It would make sense what with the eyes and sapphires thing. I'm sure I may have thought of having sapphires instead of diamonds, but I wanted to get the blue binaries turning into white dwarves thing (Sirius, that is - my favourite stars).
Obviously the characters are completely different (!) but the eyes fixation is there. Eyes are clearly quite a powerful piece of imagery in stories, and especially because they are so precious to human beings, for obvious reasons, any fairytale or scary story involving eyes is always going to be affecting. And it does make me a little uncomfortable reading it, let alone writing it.
But now that you mention it, I guess we could see Wilde's Dorian Gray as a fairytale, and equally inverted perhaps.
The more one thinks about fairytales the more one realises they just crop up everywhere! We can't get away from them!
Maybe I shall try and write something that isn't a fairytale. There's a challenge and I wouldn't bet on success...
Just a quick note - my recent browsing got me to this site: https://fairytalez.com/about-us/faq/ which I am definitely going to sign up to. They seem to have over 2,300 tales to read, and you can write your own. Now that sounds intriguing...
Well, this was dark but appealing. I was reminded of the Happy Prince here. Did you ever read that one?
I'd forgotten about that one. We do have a collected Oscar Wilde somewhere in the house (we have books and bookshelves all over the place, as well as a whole load in the attic), but it's been ages since I read it. So I can't say if that might also have been some kind of subliminal influence. I think I came fairly late to Wilde but The Happy Prince may well have been somewhere in my childhood collection. It would make sense what with the eyes and sapphires thing. I'm sure I may have thought of having sapphires instead of diamonds, but I wanted to get the blue binaries turning into white dwarves thing (Sirius, that is - my favourite stars).
Obviously the characters are completely different (!) but the eyes fixation is there. Eyes are clearly quite a powerful piece of imagery in stories, and especially because they are so precious to human beings, for obvious reasons, any fairytale or scary story involving eyes is always going to be affecting. And it does make me a little uncomfortable reading it, let alone writing it.
But now that you mention it, I guess we could see Wilde's Dorian Gray as a fairytale, and equally inverted perhaps.
The more one thinks about fairytales the more one realises they just crop up everywhere! We can't get away from them!
Maybe I shall try and write something that isn't a fairytale. There's a challenge and I wouldn't bet on success...
Just a quick note - my recent browsing got me to this site: https://fairytalez.com/about-us/faq/ which I am definitely going to sign up to. They seem to have over 2,300 tales to read, and you can write your own. Now that sounds intriguing...