What do you include that readers probably don't notice?

[Priscilla_June]

Well now I'm excited

Thanks it is very motivating to hear others be excited about your work.

 

[dadadadiox]

I drop music references, song lyrics, literary tidbits, lines from Bogart films, and cultural minutia from the story's era. I'm sure older folks pick up on some but the younger readers likely miss many of them.

 

[Bodington]

In my current ongoing novel, which I haven't yet finished, but have submitted parts of it already, my FMC is a part time tennis player who participates in some WTA tournaments including Wimbledon. I have a scene where she is consulting with a law firm in Zürich, Switzerland. For the name of my fictional Zürich law firm, I utilized the surnames of three prominent female Swiss tennis players.

 

[MyBareTorso]

I have some over-arching narrative stuff that often continues through many of my essentially stand-alone stories, plus many references back to older stories, and a few connections between characters. I have also named lots of things after my followers...

 

[Rob_Royale]

In my latest, I dropped a few sci-fi and pop culture Easter eggs. Someone young might not catch them all.
It's Boldly Cumming, link below.

 

[EmilyMiller]

What do you include that readers probably don't notice?​

In my RolloJTomasi stories, I always had the FMC’s surname being Miller.

In A New York Fuck, it’s Sadie Melnyk (Ukrainian for Miller).

In While There is Hope, it’s Esperanza “Hope” Molinera (Spanish for Miller).

Which I guess is kinda funny as Miller isn’t my real name either, though a European version of it was in my family tree a few generations back.

Emily

 

[Cagivagurl]

I don't know if they count as Easter eggs, but I've name-dropped women scientists who should be better known:

Rosalind Franklin, who actually did the X-ray diffraction experiment and figured out that DNA is a helix, but got screwed out of her Nobel prize.

Vera Rubin, the astronomer who produced the first evidence for dark matter. Nobel-worthy work, but the Royal Swedish Academy wasn't giving out prizes to astronomers back then.

I also can't help jargon-dropping in the hope that my readers will use the references to delve a bit deeper into the fields:

fMRI

bullae and tokens

magnetar

backpropagation and GANs

Oh, and I always use Oxford commas. It's just science. And it's been backed up by the courts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispute

Every story I write has a lyric from a song imbedded within it.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Since my stories are based in the eighties, I include cultural references, news, and song lyrics and titles from that era.

 

[Djmac1031]

I make all kinds of pop culture references in my stories, some more obscure than others.

Lots of Star Wars references. Other films as well.

I think my deepest cut was in The Devil And Angel Em.

The She-Demon character Cozbi also used a human pseudonym: Randi Freeman.

That name choice, along with a specific outfit she was clad in (Denim jacket with pins, faded jeans, cowboy boots) was an homage to Randall Flagg, the demonic villain in Stephen King's novel The Stand as well as several other stories.

Flagg also used several pseudonyms all with the initials R.F.

And so I thought it perfect that my demon character would choose a pseudonym with the same initials.

As an added bonus; the male Randall became the female Randi, which also is a play on "randy" as in horny. Which of course she often is.

 

[orangecurious]

Since my stories are based in the eighties, I include cultural references, news, and song lyrics and titles from that era.

mine are based in recent times, still have lots of 80's references, especially lyrics... we were young, despite the years, back then

 

[MrStill]

In some recent parts of my Mailgirls Down Under series, an American who transferred to the Australian office has the name of a certain IRL English cricketer. He can't understand why some local Australian colleagues instantly dislike him and why at least one of them has encouraged him to go to a sports bar and introduce himself around.

 

[Mogrem]

All of my stories are set in the same fictional world and there is always background events that are happening that are shared between them.

All my stories happen in the same house (if they are set in a normal house, and not a mega-mansion or life-boat or Garibaldi's toupee or wherever). I hope no-one notices, because it shows my severely stunted imagination when it comes to furnishings. So instead I just don't describe the place much. The house moves through time and space, by the way.

Also --- and this isn't entirely in the spirit of the question --- but half the sex scenes I write are written with loving details, whilst the other half are done without much fuss and written somewhat mechanically. The latter are the scenes that I don't find personally erotic--- they are the darker and not so wholesome scenarios which are 'stimulating' to write in the same way that writing a ghost story is stimulating, or danging over the edge of a bridge is stimulating. It is unnerving, but its exorcising something. Imagining the scenario is stimulating/unnerving, but lingering on the act itself = not necessary.

I suspect that most readers have no idea of the distinction and couldn't pick out which stories or scenes were which, and that's fine. Its not the public square, I'm not here to advertise my character, I don't need to caveat dark stories with "This one isn't really me, I promise! I much prefer long romantic dinners; I'm just writing this as an exercise." That makes as much sense as a horror movie ending with the cast saying, "But we're not really into demonic possession! We all go to Church, honestly!"

 

[Rob_Royale]

Pieces of my life. The MMC in my Aunt Tina series is in the U.S. Coast Guard. My MMC in Trailer Park Trixie is a big time cyclist. Famine to Feast features a slightly embellished heroic retelling of some of my first sexual experiences. That kind of stuff.

 

[Duleigh]

In my story Friend Zoned, all the crazy things that happened on the flight line - the lieutenant who dropped nukes, the helicopter landing on a truck, the frogs in the cart can and more, it all really happened to me. When a reader says, "That couldn't happen," I can respond with, "I sometimes wish it didn't"

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Only thing I can recall is a Wayside School reference.

 

[Shady_Lady]

I will often play with the names, so, for example, in a story that isn't allowed here, there was a couple called Liz (Elizabeth) and Phil (Phillip) with two of their children being Anne and Edward.

In another, I called the main character Andy Davies (from Toy Story).

I wrote a short gay story where one character was called George and the other Andrew

 

[Writer61]

I sometimes include little jokes in names of people and places.

In my series The Fall of Laura the FMC begins her career at a company which will sound familiar to British TV viewers of a certain age. The place of her final downfall is a reference to "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

There's a character in a WIP piece named Ellen Bach. Another story that I am working on includes a German spa hotel with a jokey name.

 

[WhiteTailDarkTip]

Someone commented that they liked my Hitch-Hiker’s Guide references - which was nice - except I’ve been over the story two or three times and I still can’t spot them.
So this is a case of the reader noticing something I didn’t know I’d included …

 

[THBGato]

Someone commented that they liked my Hitch-Hiker’s Guide references - which was nice - except I’ve been over the story two or three times and I still can’t spot them.

Maybe you just had a character use a towel?

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

The whole Aunt Nancy bit is a throwback to some of the very early erotica paperback books. I'm not sure I can prove it any more, but I recall a series of very naughty books by that name.

And then the subtitle 'Fun with Dick and Jane ... '.

 

[RetroFan]

I put in a little Easter Egg in my story 'The Day Scotty Saw Too Much'. The specific date is not mentioned, but from the descriptions it could only happen on one of two days - Saturday 5th November 1955 or Saturday 12th November 1955. The first date of course is the one where Marty McFly travelled back in time from 1985 to 1955 in Back to the Future, and the second is the date where he returned to 1985 from 1955, before he and Doc returned a day later in BTTF 2.

Nobody picked up on this, like nobody picked up on another Easter Egg in another 1950s-set story, 'Cindy's Close Encounter' where Cindy, her boyfriend and their friends visit New York City at the end and Cindy notes seeing Singer Tower, an iconic Manhattan Building that was sadly demolished in the early 1970s.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I had this piece of dialogue in Amorous Goods: The rockabilly travelling pants, and no one seemed to pick up the song reference or The Simpsons one.

"And Stacy is staying here for a few nights. Did you know she's broken off her engagement with Kevin? I knew that boy was no good. Imagine, him going off with Stacy's mom. Mrs Lovejoy said she was sure there was something going on, her wandering around in nothing but that red bikini while he was mowing the lawn. Obviously, the poor girl can't stay at home in that situation."

I must admit, I was a bit disappointed.

 

[StillStunned]

I'm probably being premature with this, seeing as the story only went up yesterday and I've had a whopping two comments on it, but here goes.

In Upstream a hiker stumbles upon a hidden pool with a mysterious naked woman. They have sex, he leaves, that's it. There's an implication that she's supernatural, but nothing is made explicit. She could just be another hiker who also found the pool. Who happens to be have the same name as a Celtic goddess of springs and streams. Could be.

But here's the thing. All she's wearing is a pair of stone bracelets, which match the stone of a bridge laid across the stream. A stone that's not like the other stones occurring there. And here's the "readers probably don't notice" bit: it's a reference to "Prince Caspian" by CS Lewis, where a stone bridge that's built across a river shackles the god of that river.

(For a while I toyed with the idea of the hiker smashing the stone bridge and setting her free. Possibly hearing later that the whole area has been destroyed by floods.)

 

[yowser]

I'm probably being premature with this, seeing as the story only went up yesterday and I've had a whopping two comments on it, but here goes.

Premature explanation?

 

[StillStunned]

Premature explanation?

It might seem premature on the outside, but I've been edging for seven months.