Author’s Notes and Mutant Hybrid Fiction · 3:49pm Dec 6th, 2015
I have now uploaded some 3600 words of Author’s Notes to Time on Their Hooves, spread across the seven chapters, to provide further details on the science, history and other random references to real world trivia which were woven into this story, from Zero Longitude to Atomic Clocks.
In doing this, I am breaking the rules. We are told by online authorities on How to Write a Story that Author’s Notes should be kept to a minimum. Nobody is interested in you showing off how much research you’ve have done. Don’t bombard your reader with irrelevant detail. If you have to explain your jokes they can’t be funny. Show don’t tell.
But this is my story and I’ll do it my way. Although I do welcome any comments, negative or positive, on this approach.
I embarked on this endnote engineering exercise after finishing one of the best books I read this year: Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. The book version of her online comic. This is an odd mutant hybrid species (her words), starting off telling the story of Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer. But as the historical reality has a rather disappointing ending (Lovelace died young and the Analytical Engine was never constructed), the book instead explores a fictional alternative. This, on its own, would have been cool, but not really distinguished from the many other alternative steampunk timelines created for comic book universes. What makes this one stand out is the detailed footnotes, explaining the real world science and history in an accurate and entertaining way. This is very appropriate for a book on Lovelace as her published scientific output was in the form of footnotes. In an era when a woman writing a scientific paper would have been frowned upon, she instead published a translation of a French paper (translation was an acceptable activity for ladies), annotated with footnotes. The total length of her footnotes was rather longer than the original paper.
So yay for mutant hybrids! Another computer science text I can recommend is Lauren Ipsum.
Hurrah for mentioning Lauren Ipsum!
What I always do is companion blog posts, linked in the chapter. About a quarter of my readers read them. It's also a good place to get into more off-topic discussions. Like this, for example.
3597416
I remember your notes on Pinkie Pie vs the TSA.
That can work very well. All depends on the story and the extra info. In this case I felt it was better to put the notes at the end of the chapters. I didn't want to post a series of long blog posts on a story which only a fraction of my followers are tracking. I would then have to add spoiler warnings and stuff and it gets complicated. If I write any further notes on this story I will probably do it as a blog post, but I think I need to take a break from this one now or I'll never stop fiddling with it.
That does look interesting! Are the footnotes only in the book or does their website have everything too?
3597909
The website seems to have most of the footnotes. There may have been a few extra bits in the book - I've lent my copy to someone so I can't check now.
I need to reread your story and read the linked comics.
3597505
Yeah, it might not be the best way to do things--at least with the A/N at the end of a chapter, you can be assured that readers will see it, while a link might be passed by. But, to me the big advantage is that I can be more verbose in the blog than I'd be in an author's note.