This is the seventh question posed to me in a now lost audio interview which I am answering now in text. Many of these questions and answers apply to the whole series and this one in this entry does as well:
A large part of the last few years of your life have been devoted to exploring theological issues on your website sntjohnny.com. Have your experiences in that forum informed this novel?
There is no question that my Internet ministry has informed Fidelis and the entire Birth Pangs series. The Birth Pangs series has many purposes and one of them is to provide a tool for me to communicate in story form what I have attempted to communicate elsewhere in argument and discussion.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that the series is entirely designed to reflect back on my apologetics experiences, though. The series is equally informed by events in my life, events in history in general, and my overall way of looking at the world which is distinctly Christian. While I think it would be fair to say that many characters and events in the BP series can be tied in some way to a forum discussion, or a particular musing about reality in my own life, I’d urge some caution in trying to interpret the whole book and everything in it in that way.
The reason for this is that one of the things I was particularly sensitive to was to make sure that the story was enjoyable on its own terms. Readers have to be able to relate to the characters and events in the story. That’s the whole point, really. I want them to put themselves in the places of the people in the story going through what they’re going through and have them more or less compare what the characters do with what they would do.
The Christian overtones I think are hard to miss but it is my hope that they are not so overbearing as to turn off a secular or even atheistic reader. In fact, I think readers like that will enjoy some of the fun I have in addressing some of their challenges. 
Tags: apologetics, story