The Moon's Apprentice - Chapter One Footnotes · 7:19pm Jun 28th, 2014
As nothing can stop the wisdom of TheGreatSmooze, I've double posted the footnotes here and at the end of the chapter. If this works out well, I'll probably do this for every chapter.
¹The doctors said I have DSPD, or delayed sleep-phase disorder. They said it was sometimes possible to cure it, but I never understood why anypony would want to sleep at night. And besides, Luna was nocturnal too, so it worked out perfectly.
²Cadance got me permission to use the archives a season after my first flare. Although she had looked pretty upset when I had asked, she had said she wasn’t upset with me though³.
³Except when I take a wrong turn. Whenever I wander off – even the slightest bit – in the castle, I have an absurd tendency to get myself hopelessly lost. Still, there’s guards posted everywhere so it’s not like I’ll die or anything. Cadance worries too much.
⁴Luna’s already taught me a few simple ways to subdue ponies that want to hurt me without expending much magic. There’s this place just underneath a pony’s spine that a gentle nudge with magic causes temporary paralysis for a couple days⁵. Supposedly, it doesn’t hurt after the first few seconds, but I’ve never had anypony try to hurt me, so I don’t really know.
⁵The average length of time for a doctor to fix the damage.
⁶A frequent occurrence, unfortunately. So much so that Luna once spent two entire weeks lecturing on nothing but repair spells even though I only ever really used the brute force one.
⁷Some ponies thought our house was enchanted to always look ‘pristine’. I just break a lot of things.
⁸So maybe it wasn’t actually a simple spell. But it was simple stuff compared to what I usually learned from Luna. Having magic in general as your special talent made learning new spells super easy compared to how difficult most unicorns found them.
⁹Nopony seemed to know why they were abandoned. There was still plenty of crystals to mine and the mining infrastructure – which I wasn’t actually supposed to touch – was still mostly intact. The mine carts were pretty fun to ride. …Once.
¹⁰Could you imagine climbing a thousand steps daily? Twice? Inclined planes are the way of the future.
¹¹Mostly with Luna’s money. Apparently she has quite a few rich friends who got that way from managing her assets while she’s on the moon. I didn’t seem to have a limit on educational funding in a strange case of reverse tuition. Luna was, no question, the nicest teacher ever.
¹²Secretly something I liked more than butterscotch cookies and even magic. But again, that’s a secret.
¹³Luna said I should get used to the idea if I want to ascend, but magic coming out of my hooves to grab things is just…just weird. And apparently earth ponies get tactile feedback with it too. Sooooo weird.
¹⁴The archivists had a ton of spells for remote policing of their sacred shelves. Kind of admirable. Kind of obnoxious on every conceivable level. And that really said something coming from a bookworm that liked quiet like myself.
¹⁵Except for Luna, adults had no respect for foals. Not that I was going to be baited into wasting my time on writing such a book.
¹⁶Maybe foals should have no respect for adults.
¹⁷Even I thought she needed to pay a visit to a dentist. Ponies aren’t supposed to have sharp teeth and I can’t imagine her not cutting her tongue on them everyday. It can’t be easy to eat either.
¹⁸Also known colloquially as the ‘back off, mister’ spell among Manehattan unicorn and pegasi mares. Or lightning, if a pony got technical.
¹⁹Occurring just after I had forced Shining to sing and dance the Sunshine Sunshine rhyme with me when she had walked into the room. Perfect. Timing. Mwahahaha!
²⁰A prestigious award that I had no interest in accepting, but I had heard my parents offhoofedly remark that there were some real contenders this year.
²¹Being ‘awake’ while asleep had a tendency to make it ‘entertaining’ to watch me sleep. Quote mom and dad.
Thanks. It's really helpful.
Please do. Putting them all in a separate blog post is a great idea. It's infuriating to scroll down to the end of a chapter and accidentally see the ending line.
I personally prefer where you put the footnotes directly under the paragraph that it is located in
I actually saw it done this way in The Celestial Code. The first example is in chapter two about half way down the page.
I like it better that way because I missed quite a few footnotes because I read over them your current way.
However I noticed that I quickly adapted to your way so it does not really matter that much
I don't see a reason to have them as footnotes to start with. These are relevant details for immersion, not cut scenes or scrapped first drafts. Just put them in the chapter itself. A few brief lines do not warrant a cut, and on the off chance that the cut line is important to know, you've just killed the flow of immersion. Now readers, instead of actually reading the line, have to tab windows or go and click on the blog post. There is no reason to do this. Either cut them, or put them in the story.