This gets into the not-so-guilty-pleasures department. I like to
tuckerize. With this caveat: I have
no time for the “if you’re not nice to me I’ll put you in a book and kill you horribly” kind of thing. I have never included any real-life person as a character in my work who I didn’t really like, or who wasn’t a good friend. Life’s too short. When you’re having a good time, it’s your friends you want around you.
And those inclusions are all
over the damn place. Over thirty-plus years and fifty-plus novels, screenplays, comic scripts, computer games and whatnot, I can’t think of a single one of them that doesn’t include a tuckerization of some kind. Friends appear as starship captains and in passenger manifests. There are people who die heroically (by request), people who survive heroically and are action heroes (like the owner of a favorite Dublin restaurant). Neighbors appear, other writers appear, business associates appear. Etc., etc. (Sometimes when other writers are involved, the gesture gets returned, which is sweet.)
In the YW books alone: Nita is (
ETA for clarity) named after a real person – not a young person – with a name change. Ponch was a real dog (with a name change). Picchu was a real macaw (no name change). Ed was a present to a friend who likes sharks (name altered. And just as well: imagine the excitement of fitting Ed'rashtekaresket onto a driver’s license). There are many other incidences of this kind scattered across over the nine books.
And then of course we come to Tom and Carl. At the time I introduced them into the series, I don’t think I was clear how integral they were going to become to business when I included their names. But now, well, there they are. Hindsight being twenty-twenty as usual, had I known then what I know now, I would have changed their names. I didn’t.
Now, however, I need to avoid having people do what my mother would have called “jumping to concussions” about the real people from things that are going on in the fictional narrative. The YW series is obviously not a
roman à clef, but it’s never wise to underestimate people’s ability to act like dingbats. When the series eventually goes to screen, the publishers will have an excuse to bring all the first nine books out in new covers, in the New Millennium Edition versions: and when that happens I can make some discreet name changes and then move on to other things. (Of which at that point there will be
way too many.)
