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Internet Writer by David Scholes
 (3 ratings)
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They only ever knew him by his posting name B Dub.
As a youth he hoped for recognition and perhaps even a modicum of fame.
It did not come, at least not then.
He posted his stories on various web sites on the internet, receiving occasional mixed reviews. His various offerings to assorted literary agents, publishers and magazines were singularly unsuccessful. Eventually, he stopped contacting them. Tired to his soul of rejection.
A bitterness developed within him that increased over time. Yet the writing did not stop.
Rather it increased. He took to a hermit life, existing only to write and post his literary efforts on the internet.
For a long time he regularly checked the internet sites for the numbers of hits on his stories. They were only modest numbers and eventually he tired even of this. Though he kept on writing and posting on the net.
By the time the number of viewings of his stories became significant he had long since ceased to check them.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, the entirely self taught writer's work had begun to improve.
In time a few people began to seek him out. A few fans, one or two literary agents, even a publisher. By then he had become completely non contactable.
A year later after submerging himself in his isolated cottage haven for many months B Dub finally came up for air. Taking a long, long walk in the surrounding countryside he came across a torn and dirty page of a magazine. He was half tempted to pick it up. Had he done so he would have been astonished. It was the front page of Time magazine itself, that asked the simple question "Who is B Dub?"
Back again in his cottage retreat, B Dub fleetingly considered checking the number of hits against one or two of his recent stories. Had he done so, he would have been very surprised indeed. The number of hits on a story that he had written just one month ago was past the one million mark. Older stories of his were well in excess of this mark.
B Dub never knew the impact his electronic literature had on society. Later a phenomenon began to develop where people would take time off school and work to read his electronic offerings as soon as they became available. The phenomenon started with youth but spread to the more mature segments. A hunger for the stories that could not seem to be quenched even with extensive re-reading.
One economist once calculated the resultant loss of productivity to the major economies but Government saw to it that the figures were hushed up.
Though he stayed almost completely out of human affairs B Dub, as he grew older, did not allow technology to completely pass him by. Fanatically he made sure that there was no intrusion on his privacy, electronic or otherwise.
Finally B Dub's prodigious output of superb electronic literature ceased. Quite abruptly. Only death had been able to silence him.
The man known only as B Dub never earned a red cent, or as Australians would say "a brass razoo" from his many decades of writings. Almost paradoxically, neither did anyone else. Among his greatest fans were a large firm of pre-eminent lawyers who made sure of this.
The literary works of B Dub were available free of direct charge to anyone who could access the internet. Which later in his life was pretty much every person on Earth.
Just as in B Dub's time the physical book yielded to the e-book, available on a myriad of small portable devices, so after that time the e-book yielded to further advances in technology.
For a time interest in the work of B Dub, internet writer, deceased, seemed in decline.
That is until mankind was admitted as a fledgling member of the Galactic Federation and a new market for his works emerged.
The rest of the Galaxy!
End
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