E is for End Notes

        (My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Bittersweetness & Light, my new collection of hope-filled, joy-inducing fantasy and sci fi short stories, poems, and art.  I’ll be sharing lots of excerpts from the book, and I’ll also be sharing some of the background on why we urgently need joyful stories.  If you like fantastical creatures, magical worlds, and being reminded of the good to be found in the world, come along with me!  And if you’d like to see what my fellow A to Z bloggers are up to, check out the Master List.)

        The meat of Bittersweetness & Light is poems, short stories, and art, but there’s other content in there, as well.  There’s a Preface laying out the theme, and there are Notes at the End.  They’re not scholarly End Notes with citations, but instead they’re the stories behind the stories: background and process and other tidbits.  Lots of people don’t care about this stuff, and they are certainly welcome to ignore the notes.  The contents stand on their own and don’t need any explanations.  But some people are curious and enjoy a little glimpse behind the scenes.  For example, a couple of the pieces are based on true stories, even though they’ve become speculative fiction in my book.  Some of the pieces have a surprisingly long history of creative process - I’ll be sharing one of those stories at R.

        The End Notes are not, I hope, utterly dry.  They’re illustrated with sketches, photographs, and other bits and bobs of art that shed a little light on the background of various other pieces.  I didn’t want more than a page to go by in this book without something fun to look at, even in the End Notes!  So today’s picture is a little collage of some of the images that appear in the End Notes.  I tried to make sure that even this minor part of the book contributes to the sense of joy.

        Marketing Moral: Do you prefer Ebooks?  Ebooks simply cannot reproduce the formatting of paper pages, and in a book like Bittersweetness & Light, which includes art elements on almost every page, the ebook just isn’t the same experience.  That’s why I don’t currently have the ebook available on Amazon.  However, an ebook version does exist if that’s your thing, and if you’re interested you can contact me to purchase.

        Proper Moral:  Still waters run deep; don’t forget that behind every story there are always more stories.

        How do you feel about end notes, footnotes, acknowledgements, and all those little extras in books?  Do you like the supplemental information, or do you ignore it all completely?

[Picture: Assorted illustrations by AEGNydam from Bittersweetness & Light, 2025 (See NydamPrints.com).]