Oh yes. I had good intentions when I set up the website. I actually did it on the insistence of my publisher, who sees it as a marketing tool, but I had to build and maintain it myself. I managed to get one of my friends to be my webmaster, and it was his idea to do this gradual interview.

I hoped it would be popular, but almost immediately there were 250+ questions in the queue and I was struggling to keep up. The initial idea was for me to only answer questions "if I felt like it". It wasn't until my Presbyterian guilt kicked in and I started to feel bad for the people who had taken the time to ask questions that I really started to get into answering them.

Well, back in the beginning after I had 47 rejections, Del Rey picked up the trilogy because by then I had finished all three books - Lord Foul's Bane, The Illearth War, and The Power that Preserves - and they were released all together as hardbacks.

Of course no one was going to rush into a store and buy three big books by someone they'd never heard of, but this publishing the whole trilogy at once was unprecedented so the books got a lot of reviews. Hundreds of reviews. So in a sense when the paperbacks came out - Lord Foul's Bane was nine months after the hardback - there was a ready made audience and that's when I started to get letters and find out what real readers thought of them.

Well now people are buying uncorrected bound proofs off eBay and reading the novel three weeks before release! I get questions right away. Interestingly though, Fatal Revenant is generating many fewer "spoiler" type questions compared to The Runes of the Earth.

I think the first book in the Last Chronicles really puzzled some people, they weren't sure where it was going so they had a lot of questions about what was coming next. I'm really happy that Fatal Revenant seems to have given them a much clearer picture of where I'm going with the story.

That said there has been a sort of change on the site as more and more questions about the books get answered. We've shifted to a more philosophical mode with lots of questions about influences and imagery. There's also a lot of discussion about whether or not Thomas Covenant should be forgiven for the rape of Lena in the first book, and whether or not I should be forgiven for letting him rape Lena.