I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

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.

I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.