A river of words flowed between us.

I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.

I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.

Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.