What are your best easter eggs?

[TheWritingGroup]

In Wager, Don and Maureen Helfer's daughters are Emily, Flora, and Genie. In the sequel, we learn that his sisters are Emily and Fiona.

There's a Helfer family tradition of kids with alphabetical-order first names, going back to his grandparents (who had nine children). Don's father is their fifth, Edgar.

It isn't obvious, but the Emily mentioned in Pranked: Barbie is Emily Helfer, Don's middle sister. The funny thing (to me) is that Barbie has met Emily, and knows Don Helfer (who is their neighbor, Maureen is friends with Barbie's mother, as seen in "Wager", technically a side-story to Pranked), but didn't realize they were related because Em didn't use her last name when they met at the gym.

 

[FrancesScott]

It’s rather more obvious than an Easter Egg.

The entire premise of my story, You Belong With Me, is the Taylor Swift song of the same name. What if a) the protagonist was the man not the woman, b) what if they both realized he wanted to be with her and not the Cheer Captain? What if they needed a little help from some older people along the way?

I shifted to the summer after high school - for obvious reasons - and turned the scenario into an awkward, teen melodrama, with much fumbling and many missteps. I also reused lyrics from the song copiously.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Would anyone get this?



'If you want to get through this, you're going to have to learn to walk in these with grace, not like Gracie Hart.'

 

[MK_Whimsy]

More a reference than an easter egg. In Detention Searches, the MC is shown playing a computer game that bears a strong resemblance to Civilization. Then as he's hauled away, he's told, "Kinda nice being away from civilization, isn't it?"

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

In the story "His Fair Lady" that I am submitting to the 2026 Summer Lovin Contest, I tried to place several Easter eggs.

It starts with the title, which is obviously a reference to Pygmalion (My Fair Lady), and the main character's name, Eliza. Her second name is Doyle instead of Doolittle. And she is a woman shaped to match external expectations of her husband. Just like Eliza Doolittle, she turns out differently than her creator intended.

Then I dug into Greek myths. The story begins with the birth of Aphrodite from sea foam and stepping into the world from a seashell, as painted by Botticelli. (All with contrapposto and where she places her hand.) In Greek mythology, she is seen as the beautiful evil. (καλὸν κακόν)

Her husband is Hephaestus, who decorates her with golden trinkets and boasts about his conquest. But she ultimately cheats on him with the god of war, Ares.

In my story, the siren's song of the Odyssey is "Sweet Dreams" as performed by Annie Lennox of Eurythmics. Some lyrics are quoted: head held high; use/abuse)

And the easter egg I like most is that the first word and the last word are the same as in Joyce's Ulysses. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom also cheats on her husband and seals it with a 'Yes'. And there is a mirror in the first paragraph.

 

[SmilingLez]

I always put an easter egg in every micro fiction, flash fiction, and poetry that I post here.

 

[RetroFan]

I've got an unusual one coming up in a pending story - a hidden character.

To clarify I don't mean an unseen character - one who is referenced or just out of sight but never makes it on the page - but one who is never referenced directly but there are small clues to their existence easily overlooked until it is revealed at the end.

I wonder what the readers will think of it? The story is going into Loving Wives, so I don't think they will be overly impressed.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

but there are small clues to their existence

I think that's an interesting challenge to write this.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I have a hammerhead shark named Nial in my WIP.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I explain it in the afterword, but the main four teenage characters (legal age, note!) in Pranked are

Rick (aka "Blondie"): his more formal nickname is short for Frederick, so he could be known as "Fred", but he isn't.
Laurel: the nymph of Greek legend, Daphne, was turned into a laurel tree.
Wilma (aka "Billie"): Velma is a variant of Wilma.
Esau: the Hebrew name means "hairy". Alternate translation: "shaggy".

They drive around in Esau's old van, the Mastery Machine. And Esau is mentioned to smoke weed, though you never see it on screen.

The joke is obscured (maybe too much) by the fact that both Rick and Wilma are known by nicknames.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Now that I'm thinking of it: several of my stories have a search engine called "Grahm Search". It is also explained in the "Pranked" afterword that this is a joke for math-savvy nerds.

Google is named after the googol, ten to the hundredth power. That is a huge number, many orders of magnitude larger than the number of protons in the visible universe.

It's trivial compared to Graham's Number, a number so inconceivably vast that if you filled the entire universe with numbers of the Planck volume (according to some formulations of quantum mechanics, the smallest possible size for anything in our spacetime) of the form nine to the power nine to the power nine ...

If you did all that, you still couldn't write down anything that's close to Graham's number.

So, my search engine is based on an enormously, bizarrely larger number than the googol, meaning Grahm Search is better than Google's.

 

[Soixenta]

I have a hammerhead shark named Nial in my WIP.

Does he have teeth like knives and skin like bark? Does he spoil women to death in a hammerhead way?

 

[Rob_Royale]

I snuck one into my Alex in Wonderland story, but you'd have to be a real Lewis Carroll student to get it.
I've swapped genders in the story so the Queen of Hearts is rather benevolent. The king is the villain.
In the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice wakes to find her older sister who is unnamed. According to scholars, the sister of the real girl who inspired Alice was named Lorina. I named my Queen, Lorina.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I snuck one into my Alex in Wonderland story, but you'd have to be a real Lewis Carroll student to get it.
I've swapped genders in the story so the Queen of Hearts is rather benevolent. The king is the villain.
In the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice wakes to find her older sister who is unnamed. According to scholars, the sister of the real girl who inspired Alice was named Lorina. I named my Queen, Lorina.

Who stole the tarts, was it the King of Hearts?






(I doubt anyone will get that.)

 

[spiralholly]

I sometimes get a little heavy with the media/cultural references, to the point where one character will ask the other "Where'd you come up with that one?" to which the reply is "I don't know; it's a mystery" = a reference to several such lines in the movie 'Shakespeare in Love'.

 

[Writer61]

More Easter eggs:

• I used the names of two English cricketers and part of another for three villages. I used another cricketer's name for a street in London.
• In a couple of stories (not yet published), I named some astronauts after airmen from 617 Squadron (the Dambusters), and some of the ships they fly in are named after vessels used by British explorers.
• In the Laura stories, there is a club called "No.42" on Dent Street.
• A deep cut: in a recent story, I mention my grandfather's local pub and the army unit that he belonged to.

 

[RetroFan]

I think that's an interesting challenge to write this.

It definitely is a challenge, I'm kind of using similar tropes to writing characters who are evil all along in crime fiction, unreliable narrators or with characters who are dead all along; very small clues that could mean something else or be completely irrelevant but make sense at the end when this is revealed. In my case, I'm trying to create an illusion that a character is an only child, when they actually are not.

The same story - for this year's Crime and Punishment competition - also has other Easter Eggs, such as many characters having the same names as serial killers or other infamous murderers. For example the dysfunctional family who run the bed and breakfast where the main characters stay have the surname Manson, one of the other guests staying there is a long-distance truck driver named Ivan Wayne West (derived from Ivan Milat, John Wayne Gacy and Fred West), the company he drives for is Jack Sutcliffe Logistics (Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper) and there is a psychiatrist named Doctor Harold Cream (a combination of serial killer physicians Dr Harold Shipman and Dr Thomas Cream) among others.