Does anyone else put personal 'nuggets' in their writing?

[ratsy]

I was thinking about my writing, and almost every piece has something special in it for my wife. She calls them nuggets. Does anyone else do this? It can be a name, and inside joke, or anything that a friend/family member/spouse will get that it's meant for them.

In my story 'The Power' coming out in Young Adventurers in December, I have a character named Mistress Ging (named after my pup)

In my new book, my MC's neighbour has a cocker spaniel, and he is going to be taking the cocker on his adventure with him.

Do you guys do things like this?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Ha! I have a blog vaguely relatd to this going up tomorrow.

I have a few:

Kare is for Kerr Avon (not that he's anything like him, but I like them both...)
Holbec, a planet, was named for my kids.

I'm sure there are others...

 

[Venusian Broon]

Yep! And all the time!

Although I am not at liberty to say exactly what I've done. (My life may be at risk...)

 

[Toby Frost]

Oh, definitely. A Welsh friend of mine did a lot of beta reading of the Smith books, so in gratitude I put him in Wrath of the Lemming Men as a commando called Jones the Laser. The only problem was that, accurately depicted, my mate didn't sound very Welsh at all, so Jones says "Aliens invading, is it?" and "There's interplanetary war for you" an awful lot more than Owen does! I also went a long way to get the words "And that's what happens when we go to play golf" into one scene, purely for the entertainment of one friend.

I'm always pleased when someone picks up on the more obscure references. A while back I met a chap from the army would had noticed all the references to antique weapons in the space-guns. I was quite surprised and pleased!

 

[ralphkern]

Ive done it a few times. I haven't told many 'real friends' that I write , but some who I have, I've given a nod to them.

In my current WIP, I'm having to change a character name though as he happens to share the name of my new boss...

 

[tinkerdan]

Seems as though any claim of guilt might collide with the intent of the disclaimer.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

I'm just sayin'

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

My dog Lucy appears in all my books.

 

[Juliana]

My writing group has this thing where we all try to slip a panda into our novels. That's us, the Pandas.

 

[Droflet]

Yep, heaps of them. More so in book two. I could tell you what they are but then, well, you know, I'd have to kill you.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Not sure if it counts as a nugget, but there's a certain car that I once got run over by. Now every Wizard at Law book has a bright pink Alpha meeting its end in various ways. In the first book it got crushed beneath a falling exploding chimney. In the second it got stolen by joyriders and wrecked. In the third which I'm finishing the edit of at the moment it got melted by a stray spell. And the fourth which I've only just started writing, I'm still dreaming up creative ways for it to die.

Don't laugh but I got the idea from the movie Her Alibi - which in my view is highly under rated - where Tom Selleck as the MC author has his ex wife die in a bizarre microwave accident in a lightning storm!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Tyburn]

In one of my books I originally named a little critter sidekick 'Bazmonkey', then realised it was the screen name of someone from a site I was a member of, so I changed it to Gizmook - the nickname for Gizzie, one of our cats.

As an appendix to 'Space Captain Flight, R.S.N. in Perils Of The Death Moon!', I created a page for the Trans-Ether Radio Times, featuring a write-up for an American sit-com (Patrol Ship 54, Where Are You?) which is a direct quote from my Dad: "Why anybody finds this rubbish funny is beyond me.". I'm sure there's a few others, but I can't think of any at the moment.

 

[LittleStar]

I do the same stuff through most of my works, though they are less personal nuggets and more just things for general people to pick up on. And they can be pretty obscure... For example, a few years ago I did a bad short (was more just a character study probably than a story) about Icarus, though i brought it out of the Greek myth world.

Lead character was called Dwight, which if you follow the minuscule bread crumbs could get to President Eisenhower, nicknamed 'Ike'. On top of this Dwight's father was called Stephen. And if you know your Greek myth, you'll know Icarus' father was Daedalus, Hence 'Stephen Daedalus' from Ullyses. As I said, convoluted and obscure. But I was very happy when one person in my writing class picked up on the latter part (after I had explained dwights name).

 

[J D Foster]

I have a few, one is every story contains someone admitting to the reader that they lied about something. This comes from an apparently annoying (according to my wife) habit I have when watching TV of saying something like "They lied" as if I were the narrator.

The other thing I do is put my friends names in as characters names (which I guess is a fairly common idea)

 

[chopper]

of course i only wrote the sequel to HTTN so i could wedge two lines of a Fall song into it....

having been informed by someone that a character's name could be translated as "bacon tree", there's a line somewhere about how "it doesn't grow on trees, you know..."

 

[Locrian]

I work with a guy who suggested I put land whales into my sci-fi novel. My first reaction was "no that's stupid". I felt like I'd been a bit hard on him, so I put in a large semi aquatic beast of burden. I also had two characters debating names for two of these creatures, and then decide on my friends first name and surname for each respective creature.

 

[Droflet]

Hey Locrian, that sounds like a huge undertaking.

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

I work with a guy who suggested I put land whales into my sci-fi novel. My first reaction was "no that's stupid". I felt like I'd been a bit hard on him, so I put in a large semi aquatic beast of burden. I also had two characters debating names for two of these creatures, and then decide on my friends first name and surname for each respective creature.

Piers Anthony had land whales. Actually, I think they were wails. The protagonists found their tracks, which were, of course, the prints of wails.

I still wince.

 

[ratsy]

I can't stop deep frying nuggets! I just did another one...will someone make it end?

 

[Tyburn]

May I just say to Toby Frost - I've been going through 'God Emperor Of Didcot' for the second time and I was quite impressed at your fitting in no less than (but possibly more than) five psychadelia song titles in one line of dialogue - after Smith comes down from his having drunk the Tea of Death.

If you're counting little in-jokes as nuggets though, Perils Of The Death Moon! is full of them. I believe I mentioned a while ago the names of all the ship's security officers are simply the words 'Red Shirt' translated into various languages. Lt. James Church, the U.S. Space Navy officer at the heart of the plot - Kirk is traditional Scots for Church. Kitty Davis, the Librarian who saves Flight's away team from a rampaging mob - Christopher 'Kit' Pedler and Gerry Davis, creators of Doctor Who's Cybermen. I could go on. And on. And On.

 

[Juliana]

If you're counting little in-jokes as nuggets though, Perils Of The Death Moon! is full of them. I believe I mentioned a while ago the names of all the ship's security officers are simply the words 'Red Shirt' translated into various languages. Lt. James Church, the U.S. Space Navy officer at the heart of the plot - Kirk is traditional Scots for Church. Kitty Davis, the Librarian who saves Flight's away team from a rampaging mob - Christopher 'Kit' Pedler and Gerry Davis, creators of Doctor Who's Cybermen. I could go on. And on. And On.

Nice one.
If we're counting in-jokes too, in my current wip I have a couple of minor characters named after minor characters in Die Hard. Just because it amused me. And I also have a veiled Dresden Files tribute. The original version had a Swallows and Amazons tribute, too, but that got chopped in the rewrite.