Here’s a thing I’m a little proud of.

Reviews for Maps to Nowhere and Ars Historica have commented on my approach to story notes — not just the content thereof, but the way I put them into the book.

This was an idea I had when I published Monstrous Beauty a few years ago — a way to accommodate the different opinions on and approaches to short stories and their associated notes. It only works in ebook; in fact, it leverages the advantages of the form.

I put all the story notes at the end of the book, so you can ignore them if you want to, jump to them using the ebook’s table of contents if you like to read them first, or encounter them in due course after you’re done with everything else. But the real advantage comes if you’re the sort of person who likes to read the notes immediately before of after the story. (I’ll be honest; I don’t understand reading the notes first. But some people do, and who am I to tell them they’re having the wrong kind of fun.) At the end of each piece I put a link to the notes — and not one of those tiny footnote links that are almost impossible to tap, either, but a nice big line of text. That takes you to the relevant section at the end of the book . . . and then, when you reach the end of a given note, you have two links: “Return to story” or “Read next story.” So if you haven’t read it yet or you want to look back at it in light of what the notes have said, you can easily do that, without having to pull up the table of contents. And if you want to continue onward, you can do that, too.

It’s a minor thing overall — a little bit of convenience in navigation. But judging by the numbers of reviews I’ve seen that mention the approach to notes and linkage as a positive aspect, it works exactly as well as I hoped it would. And that pleases me.