This is the impossible (because it’s not true) and redemptive story of Bob, a man who struggled for six years in isolation, secretly spent on his laptop with online writing and self-indulgence. It started when an older neighbor boy showed him online writing for the first time. It was fiction published in online journals and magazines. “I wish I could say it had no impact and went no farther,” Bob recounts, “but I can't. Like so many others, I was immediately hooked on online writing.”

Online writing was like alcohol. Once he got a taste of it, he couldn't leave it alone, and as the years passed, his obsession with online writing became even worse. “I was it doing it all over the place. In the bedroom. In the kitchen. One time I was visiting an online writing site right out there on the front porch where everyone could see.”

All the literary journals on the Web could not satisfy his immense appetite for online writing, so he began reading self-published fiction and then fan fiction. "I really got into the Harry Potter scene," Bob confesses.

The online writing became more and more graphic, and eventually he got involved with collaborative writing. Sometimes the writers would take turns adding text to the online writing. Sometimes you didn’t know what the writer before you had added to the story or what the writer after you would add. Sometimes it was a complete free-for-all.

Read his story, available in imaginary bookstores worldwide.