Do any of y'all insert Easter eggs into your writings? For instance, making place names anagrams of deeper meanings or giving characters names similar to real people where a simple Google search might reveal something interesting. If so, do you do it for your own amusement, or do you get upset(-ish) if people don't catch them?
No, not really. I'm a little leery of such gimmicks. One of my favorite series of books is marred by an "easter egg" in plain view in the name of the protagonist, Lilith. I love those books, but seriously, Lilith? A bit on the nose, aye?
Probably not , but the effect for me is the same. For me. It's the author being clever outside the paradigm of the actual story. It's like knowing that whenever you see a predominance of the color red in the scene of an Almodovar film, something bad is about to happen. Once you know this, you stop participating in the film and start looking for little tricks and hidden clues.
Once I learned that Alfred Hitchcock appeared in every one of his films, I got distracted looking for him.
I've included purposeful symbolism, but not Easter Eggs. I love Google Eggs though. "Tilt" still cracks me up.
I've only done it once, with my second novel. It's heavily about music, and features a local music festival. One of the headliners at the festival is a character from one of my very early works (which was a story about that character becoming a musician). So for those who read that work (nobody , since I only shared it with family) it's a look at how that ended up. So maybe not a real Easter Egg in the sense that readers would pick up on it, but I know it's there. Of course, I use real-world references a lot, but I don't consider them to be Easter Eggs. Same goes for inside jokes and references to personal anecdotes. I may reuse one or two of my fictional towns in future works, though. You can only make up so many suburbs of Philadelphia before the real ones get crowded out.
A question: Is it an Easter Egg if the meaning isn't known? Samuel R. Delany has a few recurring items in his books, like a man perpetually missing a shoe or someone with a pretty serious nail-biting issue.
My friend challenged me to use the name Walter in every single one of my novels, and I've kept to it. It's mainly for my amusement, but if I made it as a writer, I'm sure other people would pick up on it.
I like the Walter challenge @Thomas Kitchen I hear Nabokov was supposed to have inserted some form of butterflies into all his works. For myself, I thought it'd be awfully clever to insert my name into the novel, simply cus my name's also a flower's name so it's pretty unobtrusive, but then again it's pretty distinct - not like rose or ivy. I dunno if readers would find it cheap If I ever get round to writing my second novel, I guess it'll be my silly Easter egg lol.
I do it with character names and such every once in a while. It's just as much simply a way of finding a name for the character as it is an Easter egg. They vary greatly in how easy they are to spot, but on a general basis I tend toward the more difficult ones as it distracts less from the situation while also awarding the reader more if they actually get it. It's also a way for me to feel cleverer, and so I have to keep myself from spending too much time on it or coming up with ridiculous names for everything. Some examples from the novel I'm currently writing: The mepado is a fictional species of animal, know for it's mysterious and ferocious nature. The name means "nazi" in CL2. CL2 is a code/language I created that I sometimes use for name creation. Ada Yonderman (Ada Sr.) and Ada Myhee (Ada Jr.) are named partly after the character from Cold Mountain and partly from a girl in a scetch by Norwegian comedian Espen Eckbo. In the character name Morgan Webb Mitchell Dokenayo, the middle names are references to Robert Webb and David Mitchell, two favourite English comedians of mine, who have worked together on various projects for a long time. Brennan Halan Vernon Warata, Jake Ethan Heath Nara, Jacqueline Elvira Vivian Ograffe are the three members of the group called The Recruiters, and I made it so that their middle names would begin on two out three of the letters "H", "V" and "E". Jeremy Tamarrar is named for a song called "Tomorrow" which was Malta's entry into the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013, the character in the song being named Jeremy, and "working in IT" (a line from the song), which Tamarrar also does. Jeremy is also a character in a poem of mine, "Jeremy". There is no relation between the characters, however. Rupajed Lated Bop Hatemakit means "Myths Crash With Granger" in CL2. She is supposed to be a blend of "Myths", i.e. belief in supernatural things etc. and "Granger", i.e. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter, a very logical-thinking person relying on reason and her senses. So, she occupies a middle ground between those two extremes, and frequently suggests both magical and scientific connections to events. Four of the most important male characters, and who also are related and share the same surname, all have their names taken from actors who played characters who were in the same year at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. They often are similar in personality and appearance to the people they're based on. They are: - Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) becomes Rupert Yonderman, the father - Thomas Felton (Draco Malfoy) becomes Thomas Yonderman, the older brother - Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) becomes Daniel Yonderman, the younger brother - Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) becomes Matthew Yonderman, Daniel's son As you probably understand, these aren't references most readers would pick up on right away.
I'm not absolutely certain this is deliberate, but Sue Grafton seems to insert "bougainvillea" into every one of her alphabet novels (there's one of her novels I didn't find it in, but that may be my own oversight).
No big fan of Easter eggs at all. There's nothing more annoying than people driven by the need to tell you how clever they are.
