[Kevin] How important is feedback from readers? How does reader feedback influence your writings?

[Robert] Very important. Nothing is perfect, particularly something I've written, so feedback lets me know what bits stank to high heaven so I can improve the stories. Still, a bit of praise is always nice once in a while!

[Kevin] Both "More Sinned Against Than Sinning" and "Callisto Explains It All" are set a few years from now. Why did you set these stories in the present?

[Robert] I hate fantasy stories ("The mighty barbarian Thrig set off to the city of Throg to get the rune of Thrug from the evil dragon of Thrag..." Oh please!) and I hate the history rewriting that goes on on X:WP and H:TLJ. Therefore a story set in the Xenaverse was right out.

Secondly, I like to follow things through to their conclusions. Callisto's immortal, she's a goddess. Therefore she lives forever. What does she do with herself once everyone she knows has died or gone to Olympus? Does she take over the world? If not, why not?

I also applied the same principle to the gods: why aren't they still around? If they are, why don't we know about them?

And so on. The benefit of setting something slightly in the future is that you can make incredible things happen to the world which would otherwise be noticed if they happened now. But I didn't want to set it too far in the future because then I'd be doing science fiction. I also wanted people to be able to say "Ha! It didn't happen," when the times in question come round. The year 2000 seemed perfect because of this and because of its psychological importance.

[Kevin] From your e-mail address I surmise that you live in the UK. Has Hercules and Xena been shown through season 4 and 3, respectively? If not, how have you kept up with the Callisto episodes so you could add the multiple-choice question in "Callisto Explains It All" chapter 6?

[Robert] I do indeed. And yes they have. We're generally about three or four months behind you when the season starts being shown but because we don't have re-runs in the middle of seasons, we're only one or two behind when the season finishes.

When I started "Callisto Explains It All", Sacrifice hadn't been aired. In fact, I started work on it the week before it aired in the States: I was in Alabama on business and I saw the trailer during the one with Autolycus and the statue theft (I've forgotten the episode name). To keep up with Callisto character development, I read every spoiler thread about Sacrifice on ATX while I was writing the story. Once news of Callisto's departure had broken, I altered chapter six so it became a sort of requiem for Callisto and a way of covering up the slight problem of how Callisto could still be alive in my stories after she dies onscreen.

[Kevin] "The Making of a Modern Goddess", which is the sequel to "More Sinned Against Than Sinning" and "Callisto Explains It All", has a unique web-magazine style. What prompted you to present the story this way?

[Robert] If you look at fan fiction on the web, it almost entirely continues on from the sort of printed stories that used to be distributed at conventions in the 70s and 80s. Basically, you could print out the average piece of web fan fic and if someone else picked it up and read it, they'd probably have no idea it had ever been on the web. This bothers me, because there's a lot of opportunities with the web to do things you can't do in print.

When I was writing the story, I had the problem of how to integrate all my flashbacks in without making them complete non sequiturs. Since "Callisto Explains..." is ostensibly reprinted from "Callisto" magazine, the two ideas collided and out came the web magazine format. Once I had that, a load of things came out that wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise. There's a sort of influence from the books "The Andromeda Strain" and "The Ipcress File" creeping through as well - the whole "make it seem real by using the semiotics of the original medium" deal. You'd be surprised by how many people have applied for subscriptions to Callisto magazine....