Why are you calling this an FAQ page when nobody's asked this stuff yet?

Because I couldn't think of a snappy acronym for 'Questions likely to be frequently asked in the future'.

Who's this 'Josh' guy?

If you use iPodLinux, you'll know him as the guy who was contributing to it at the tender age of fifteen. Otherwise, take my word for it when I say Josh is way smarter than you. Josh is a native Californian and currently in his first year at MIT, and will probably be buying and selling small countries before he turns forty. Addressing him as 'dude' is not recommended, nor is commenting on his passing resemblance to Jimmy Neutron...

Oh, bugger. Moving swiftly on...

Do you post under your real names?

Skipping the debate on what exactly constitutes your real name, 'James Jago' is what it says on my birth certificate. (Note to any Cornish speakers in the audience: Yes, my parents knew. They did it anyway.) Anne and Kit do use pseudonyms, however. And I can't remember Anne's real name or pronounce Kit's, so I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to. Sorry.

Do you care if I download your premium stories and put them on Limewire or whatever?

Good question, and I can't speak for the others here. On the one hand, the more people read my stuff, the more likely I am to land a lucrative publishing deal when I pitch No Fairytale to Baen some time after I get it finished. Letting the entire Internet know how awesome you think my stories are is really not something I can object to.

On the other hand, running this place does cost money. If everyone was reading our stuff for free somewhere else, we'd have to scrap the payment system and put ads up instead, and the whole point of the pay-per-read approach is that you probably find those as annoying as we do. So, in a nutshell, please leave our stuff off The Pirate Bay until we're established enough to turn a profit selling t-shirts and coffee mugs and stuff?

Of course, emailing a copy to a friend or something is and always will be 100% fine with me. That's the infinite-goods equivalent of your kid brother borrowing your copies of several Discworld novels, except you don't have to nag him to replace them when they end up MIA after a tsunami hits his hotel... But that's another story.

How do you co-write stories?

One of us writes a few paragraphs, then emails it to the other. They tweak it a bit -well, Anne tweaks my stuff; I'm still too much a starry-eyed Dangerverse fanboy at heart to feel comfortable changing hers- and write a few more paragraphs, then email it back. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out who wrote which part of 'The Redstone Chronicles'. We also only discuss a few very general details of what we have planned, so if Anne throws out another jaw-dropping plot twist, odds are I'm as stunned as you are. I don't know whether this approach would be endorsed by professional writers as an efficient means of turning out saleable prose, but it's a lot of fun.

Is it just me, or is Cleansing Thobatol a bit reminiscent of Dwarf Fortress?

Well, Toady One does call it a 'plot generator'. I did check with him to make sure I wasn't violating Bay 12's IP, and he also asked me to make it clear that it's definitely not an official DF fic.

But just so he's indisputably getting something out of this: DF is mind-bogglingly awesome. Go over to www.bay12games.com/dwarves and try it out. You won't regret it.

Why no buttons for Digg, StumbleUpon etc?

Bandwidth limitations; our current hosting arrangements are a bit ad-hoc. We'll look into implementing this feature once we've upgraded.

I want to save your stuff on an eBook reader. What should I do?

Until Josh gets a free weekend to knock out the necessary code for a parser, the easiest solution is probably to go to the printer-friendly version, copy and paste the text into your word processor of choice and save it in a format your reader can cope with; recent versions of Word and OpenOffice have the ability to export the open document as a PDF file, which even a Kindle should be able to cope with.

Can we get swimsuit pictures of Anne or Kit instead of a bonus story?

Somehow I wouldn't count on it.