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One of my favorite things about writing is the idea of the “Easter egg.” This concept started out in video games, where developers would hide a surprise in a bit of code that might trigger a secret weapon, a cache of gold coins, or some other cool thing that wasn’t an official part of the game.
The term has since evolved in fiction to mean a bit of information in a story that connects one work to another, but only for readers who are familiar with both.
I’ve been writing regularly again, which makes me very happy. I’m going about it in typical Scott fashion, working on four things at once, round-robin. One of my current projects is a “drag queen” MM romance novella called Miz Fortune’s Lonely Hearts Salon, for a drag-themed own voices anthology coming out next year.
I decided to place it in the River City universe, which I explored in The River City Chronicles and am now revisiting in my blog serial, Down the River. This is the second River City novella, after the initial book Between the Lines that introduced Brad and Sam to my readers back in 2015.
Or is it the third? More on that in a moment.
While the characters in Miz Fortune are new, there are a number of callbacks (Easter eggs) to the main series. We learn that Sam, at one point, visited the salon to find out who he was meant to be with. And the Everyday Grind, where Ben worked in Chronicles, makes an appearance too. I’m about halfway through the story, so there will likely be a couple more eggs – look for another connection to the original Between the Lines story!
While I’m on the topic, I was writing a scene last week for Down the River about Sam, who has been living in Tucson with Brad for the last few years, and it hit me.
What if he and Brad were friends with the characters from my novella Flames? It’s my Things We Lost in the Flames Bastille-song-inspired boyfriend in a coma story that I initially published in 2016 in the A More Perfect Union anthology. It’s now available as a stand-alone novella. So Flames is now an official part of the River City universe, and I will soon be updating the cover to reflect it.
With another novella project on the horizon, this one for a “gay holiday” anthology, I’ll probably dip into the River City canon again, and come up with another batch of brightly-colored Easter eggs for your pleasure.
They’re fun to do, and deepen the experience for my most avid readers. I can’t wait to share them with you!
To my writer friends, do you embed Easter eggs in your stories? Do your readers ever notice?