if your brain needs a rolling start: what is the most memorable sky you've ever seen?
if your brain needs a jumpstart: which writing trope do you think is most egregiously underutilized? what's the most "mainstream" example where you feel it should have been used and it wasn't?
Okay! Thank you!
Memorable sky: Probably one 35-ish? years ago, back when I lived in a place without light pollution: A summer night/wee hours of the morning, sitting by my back door, watching the Leonid meteor shower (I think it was the Leonids. In any case, it was a meteor shower in the middle of a warm summer night).
Favorite trope: This one is from fairy tales -- a species of Beauty and the Beast tale, where the heroine is contractually bound to an enchanted prince (but she [usually] doesn't know he's a prince), breaks a taboo / promise she made, so the prince gets trapped by dark magic. So the heroine takes responsibility for breaking her promise, pulls up her socks, and sets out to rescue him.
The mainstream versions of this folk motif that disappoint me are most of the modern retellings of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's novel La Belle et la Bête, where the only danger the prince is in is dying of a broken heart, the only adventure Beauty goes on is to return to her family, and the only thing she does to rescue the prince is agree to marry him.
Meanwhile, the heroine of The Singing, Springing Lark (Brothers Grimm), follows her transformed-into-a-dove-husband around the whole world on foot, visits the Sun, Moon, and the Winds, helps her husband defeat a dragon, and they ride home together on the back of a gryphon.
And that's just one variant example.
