Including Easter Eggs in Your Stories

Easter eggs in our stories could be messages, or perhaps jokes or puzzles that we add for the reader to find. I haven't included them often in my stories, but I think they're fun to add. They can be simple things or maybe mentions that only a small number of people would understand. 

In my book Once Upon A Princess: Land of Dreams the heroine is a lost princess (which makes sense since it's a fairy tale retelling). The hint to her identity is in her name - at least it is for readers of the other two books in the series. 

Since this is a sequel to book one, I continued the story with a few of the characters. The heroine is named after the grandmother in the first book. So, a reader who is paying attention will know the heroine's origins before they are revealed to everyone else. 

Here's another example: in my Hathor Legacy series, the planet Hathor has twin moons called Isis and Osiris. I chose them because of the symbolism of what those mythological characters represent. In the first book, the heroine Nadira is helping Jonathan (the hero) to find his father. In Egyptian mythology Isis is looking for her husband Osiris. So, the names of the planets reflect the journey of the hero and heroine in the book. In addition, the goddess Hathor is patron of miners, and the planet Hathor's economy is based on mining. 

For my novella Metamorphosis, that is part of a series called Worlds of Fire, (and will be included in the upcoming Pets in Space 6 Anthology) I included two easter eggs. I won't be giving away spoilers by mentioning one of them. In that story world phoenix shifters are very important. When they transform, they create the portals that open up the pathways to other worlds. They play a role in this story and in my upcoming book in the series, Blood Red Moon. 

And the Floating World, the location of the beginning of Metamorphosis, also plays a central role in Blood Red Moon. Readers of both books will see the connection. Which might inspire them to find other connections between these books and others. It's part of the fun - for the author to include these mentions and for the reader to find them. If you haven't hidden any in your books perhaps it might be a good idea to give it a try.

Interested in checking out Metamorphosis? Pets in Space 6 is now in pre-order and launches on October 5th. 

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Win-A-Book Wednesday with...Jeffe Kennedy!

Jeffe Kennedy

Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author with a writing career that spans decades. Her works include non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and novels. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including Redbook. Her most recent works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion, and an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera, which released beginning January 2, 2014. A fourth series, the fantasy trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms, hit the shelves starting in May 2014 and a fifth, the highly anticipated erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under, will release starting in July.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular Word Whores blog, on Facebook, and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Foreword Literary.

Pregnant, possessed, and in love with a man I don’t dare to trust-those are the consequences of the risks I took to save my life. But Faerie, the land of blood and magic, is filled with bitter ironies, and the bargains I made now threaten me and my unborn child.
The darkly sensual fae noble Rogue still tempts me to danger and desire. As we await the birth of our child, I’ve been forced to question whether our offspring is part of a bargain Rogue once made to save himself. He can’t tell me the truth due to a spell the vicious Queen Titania has him under. Would he betray our family against his will? Could I ever forgive him if he does?
Rogue insists on an eternal commitment from me, even as Titania’s forces close in on us. I don’t know if Rogue and I can withstand her onslaught, or that of the beast within me. But I will not stop looking for answers-even if it brings the walls of Faerie crashing down.

To celebrate the release this week of Rogue's Paradise, the third book in my Covenant of Thorns trilogy, I'm giving away a digital copy! If you're new to the series and haven't read the first book, Rogue's Pawn, or haven't quite caught up with the second book, Rogue's Possession, I'm happy to substitute one of those! Happy entering!

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Braving the Fantasy Debates - Not Only Epic, but Romantic

My world seems full of fantasy discussions and parsings lately. Like Jane Kindred, who posted yesterday, I was also at the RT Convention last week. Unlike her, I feel right at home among the romance authors - much more so than at World Fantasy Con last fall, which I also attended along with Jane.

(Is she stalking me or am I stalking HER? Hmmm...)

A popular tail-sniffing question at all of these conferences is "What do you write?" This is largely in lieu of the real question, which is more along the lines of "Are you a successful writer I should be interested in talking to and should I know who you are?" My answer has always been complicated, but for now I reel off "fantasy, fantasy romance and erotic contemporary romance."

People nod at this, sometimes looking a bit glazed over. It's really not kosher to reply with more than one genre, but sue me - I've always been an eclectic kind of gal and I'm used to getting funny looks.

The thing is, to me, it all feels more or less like the same thing. Or, at least, like a continuum. The erotic contemporary romances of my Facets of Passion series have no magic per se, but I write post-apocalyptic ones (Blood Currency) that feel much the same, only in a more broken world. I'm working on edits for MASTER OF THE OPERA, a modern retelling of Phantom of the Opera, which is contemporary, erotic and also full of magical realism. The Covenant of Thorns books are about a modern woman - a scientist - trapped in Faerie. When I was shopping it (before I knew better), I called it "an urban fantasy that takes place in a non-urban landscape."

You all should have just SEEN the way the agents' eyes would roll back in their heads when I said that. One might have frothed at the mouth a little bit.

Even my own agent, who loves my work and says she wants to make me the Queen of Fantasy Romance (which apparently does not come with a tiara - what a gyp), said of one of my books "it's like epic fantasy and urban fantasy had a lurid affair and this is their baby."

Now I've been assigned yet another genre - my trilogy coming out in 2014, The Twelve Kingdoms, is being called Adult Fantasy by the publisher.

I just roll with it.

Because, really, on a fundamental level, genre is irrelevant to me as a storyteller.Yes, it's meant to convey a promise to readers, but this dividing and sub-dividing is not something that really serves anyone. If we have to spend all this time and effort parsing the difference between fantasy, fantasy romance, epic fantasy and epic fantasy romance, obviously we're not clearly communicating anything at all. When I mentioned I was writing this post, @e_bookpushers, a reviewer for The Bookpushers and fan of all kinds of fantasy, with and without romance, commented "Sometimes I think we subdivide to far and use descriptive terms that turn people off."

This is where we see the eyes glaze over. 

After all, those of us in our 30s and 40s remember an era before the Young Adult (YA) "genre" even existed. I think that's part of what's happening now. So many of us writing variations on the Fantasy theme grew up reading a melange of books - Judy Blume and Judy Garwood. Anne McCaffrey, Ann Tyler and Anne Rice. Orson Scott Card, Jack Chalker, Margaret Atwood and Mary Stewart.

We all started as readers and, as readers, we didn't really care what genre a book fell into, as long as we could find more like it. That's the key - helping our readers, and ourselves, find more of what we love to read.

I suspect that, more and more, that will occur through blogs like this one. And like The Bookpushers. Maybe we've moved past the need to describe books with a one- or two-word label. We can talk more broadly and allow more room for stories that don't quite fit neatly into a product mold.

As Miranda says in The Tempest, arguably a fantasy story, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

Brave new world, indeed.