This
is the Night...
series
in-jokes & bloopers
"Then God said, 'Your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will
call him Isaac.'" (meaning, ‘he laughs’) - Genesis 17:19, NIV
Yep... there were in-jokes. What story, song, or script is without them?
For you, the brave site-surfer, some of these in-jokes are now revealed.
Hope you get a kick out of some of them.
IN JOKES
- All the Star Trek and Star
Wars references, and making several characters fans of them, are my
attempts to make fun of my own sci-fi fandom. Some were obvious... some
were subtle. An example of a subtle reference: did you know that all of
the doctor's names were taken from the Star Trek universe? Every doctor's
last name was derived from one of the actors who played a doctor in the
Star Trek series. DeForrest Kelley, Gates McFadden, Siddig Alexander,
and Robert Picardo. Clever, isn't it? Another subtle reference: Kate’s first
name, Kathryn, was taken from the first female captain who was the lead of
a regular series, Captain Kathryn Janeway.
I wanted to tip my hat to the captain of the Voyager. (By no small
irony, I have a cousin named Katherine, a grandmother whose middle name is
Katherine, and a great-great aunt whose first or middle name was
Katherine. I remembered my cousin
when I chose the name, but I had forgotten about the other two. This was long before I knew Clay’s
grandmother was also Catherine.)
- Alfred Hitchcock and Mel
Brooks loved to take part in their own work, and it quickly became a game
to find them amongst the cast of walk-ons. Just for kicks, I managed to
hide myself (or aspects of myself) in no
fewer than three character roles seen and unseen. (One: the composer
that is Aunt Dizzy, because I do compose on the side. Two: Sally's
personality may belong to a friend, but her church music and Lutheran
background resembles my own. Three: the fan fic author that Brett told
Clay about on the night before his wedding. Four: the decision to make Patricia a
music teacher also came from my own training.)
- The whole purple rose thing.
They are my favorite flower well enough. But the in-joke is that I'm
making fun of myself for a tall tale I used to tell other girls when I was
young and stupid... that I would know my soulmate if he brought me
those flowers. Oh yeah, and I'm a published author and composer in
those dreams, too.
- Kate's two past klutz-out
stories: 1 falling off of the college stage, and 2 falling underneath a
waterfall and slamming her face into a log. Those happened to me for real
- I knew the truth was far better than anything I could make up.
- Kate's tendency to have to go
to the bathroom after being tickled was joke I came up with because of my
best friend, who often has to go to the bathroom after she laughs too
hard. Which happened a lot more often when she was pregnant...
- Kate's attempt to use
people's ignorance of Nebraska
and its people against them. Real enough; when my high school band went to
Florida,
we TORTURED the people who asked us all the stupid questions... They asked
us where our town was located, and we told them it was just east of
another town that's technically little more than a feed mill and a couple
of houses. But we didn't tell them that, we merely snickered under our
breath when they nodded like they knew exactly where it was.
- There were a lot of times I
thought I had made up events and details for the sake of the storyline,
but later they came true in one fashion or another. Or else I wrote in details that were
later somehow linked to Clay and his life far more directly than I knew at
the time. It’s a freaky thing, but
true. I won’t give you a list, it’s
too long. (Example: When I named the baby, LTS had not yet
come out… I had no idea he had an ancestor named Joseph or that it was
southern tradition to name babies after their ancestors.)
BLOOPERS
- Even as much as a sci-fi Trek
geek as I am, I still made an error... one that I didn't catch until after
the big ezBoard hacking. (In the first part of the quad, during their
movie premiere night I gave James T. Kirk an incorrect rank… I referred to
him as a captain, like he’s been through all of the series and three
movies, when during the majority of Star
Trek III he was still technically an admiral.) Since that time, I have simplified
things by removing the rank reference.
How many of you caught my mistake?
- In the first one of the quad,
Raleigh
went through a sudden gender change, a la Spot in Star Trek: The Next Generation. No, it was not intended as a nod to
Spot, though I like that idea. When
I wrote the kissy-Raleigh scene into the first one, I only knew that Clay
had adopted a puppy and named it Raleigh…
I did not know gender. I had a
fifty-fifty chance. But I chose not
to change the scene, because I liked the way I had written it too much…
which made it one of my few mistakes that never got corrected. Interestingly enough, it was about 2005
when Clay adopted a second puppy named Durham, who was indeed a boy. So I could technically make that scene
accurate, if I went back and referred to the kissy dog as Durham
instead of Raleigh.
- At first I had Clay’s
vehicles there in L.A. with him, and later
he took one of them back to Raleigh. Oops.
Then again, he eventually moved back to Raleigh.
Double oops.
- The Letterman show sign
outside of Wahoo was still up when I wrote that section of the second part
of the quad, but it has since been taken down because of age. Oops to the third power.
The Series (in chronological order):
Never Lonely Again – in the works
Every Kiss is a Kiss You Can Never Get Back - Day
1 | Day 2 | Day 3
| Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7
I've Been Waiting Forever For This - Day
1 | Day 2 | Day
3 | Day 4 | Day
5 | Day 6 | Day
7 | Day 8 | Day
9 | Day 10
I Would Go With You to the Ends of the Earth - Day 0 | Day 1
| Day 2 | Day
3 | Day 4 | Day 5
| Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8
| Day 9 | Day
10
Let All Our Tomorrows Begin
Bonus Pages:
TITN origins
TITN series in-jokes
Comparisons
Since mission work is such a big part of my heroine Kate's life, I am also
going to put up a link to the web site for my Haiti 2001 Mission Trip.
TITN series
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