1 Prologue

What makes a person extraordinary? Does it mean living life in the most extreme way? Does it mean achieving a high honor of excellence? Perhaps it means being the fastest person alive, or the richest, or the best at making ice sculptures. It is a question humans have pondered for thousands of years in order to escape the dreaded reality that most inevitably accept, that they are, in the end, simply ordinary. The reality one must accept that they are no different than the 7 billion people that live in the world or one of 100 billion who have ever lived. That if they were gone tomorrow, only a few close friends and family members would even notice they were gone if they are lucky enough to have them. And even for the few that happened to achieve excellence, the fact still remains that the earth is a rather unremarkable planet being just one planet in a solar system of 9 planets circling around 1 of the billions of stars in the universe.

Perhaps you're one of the lucky ones that did achieve excellence in your life, or are on the path to achieving it. Everyone needs a goal to strive for after all. Perhaps you can say proudly that you are the best cake maker in the entire world, or the best at chess, or the best at a certain video game. Or perhaps you're like me, just one of the 7 billion humans on planet Earth who live a not so extraordinary life and face the reality of knowing you will be nothing more than ordinary.

Still, even the most ordinary of people, in the most ordinary of towns, in the most ordinary of countries, have something they can share that does make them in a way, extraordinary. That of course, is each person's individual story. The reason one is the way they are, and why they are in the situation they are in. Everyone's story is unique after all, but nonetheless that does not necessarily make every part of one's story interesting. Most of our days are filled with mundane work and tasks after all. And if I were to share the majority of my life story it would not at all be very interesting and I am sure you would close this novel before the real story even began.

Instead let us skip ahead in the interesting part of this story. Skip to one calm summer day in July, in a city we will simply call in this story, Nothingtown, a town that shall not be named for both privacy reasons, and because "Nothingtown" is an appropriate descriptor for the town. It's just some town in the suburbs of some larger city in the United States that had buildings and people as ordinary as I was.

"You'll have the story done by next week then Kane?"

"It may take longer than that Mr. Tusin. I'm still experiencing…

"Sigh…"

On the other side of the smartphone line I could hear Mr. Tusin's, my agent's, audible groans.

"It's writers' block every week with you isn't it?"

"Well yes, I'm just in a bit of a slump right now so if you'll just give me a little time to get inspired…"

"You've had a full month to get inspired Kane."

"Well yes, writing is a delicate process that requires…"

"I don't want to hear it Kane, I've had enough of your excuses. Get an outline done by next week or I'm terminating your contract. Do you understand?"

"Yes however…"

"Do you understand?"

A cold sweat dripped down my neck at Mr. Tusin's words. For a moment it was silent. I was alone at my local park bench.

"Do you understand Kane?" Mr. Tusin repeated.

"Yes… have an outline by next week, got it."

"Good, and hopefully this time your sales will be better than that last flop you wrote. Now have a nice day Kane."

"Have a nice day Mr. Tusin."

I sighed as I hung up my phone and placed it back into my pocket. In front of me was the lake of the park I was at. It was noon on a Friday, meaning that most of the citizens of Nothingtown were off doing whatever jobs needed to be done leaving most of the park and its benches empty for me to sit quietly on and take in the atmosphere. I would often come here on days like today with nothing but my laptop, cellphone, and portable charger in hopes the atmosphere would draw inspiration out of me. It was hardly an extraordinary spot, but compared to the old brick buildings around the other parts of town, it might as well have been a majestic forest.

I was 25 that day, 3 years out of college where I majored to my parent's dismay in the subjects of creative writing and English. It was a degree that unfortunately did not garner much support from them and only left me with thousands of dollars in student loan debt and soured ties with my kin.

"Why can't you be like the other kids?" my father used to ask me. "Become a doctor, or an engineer, or a consultant. Someone useful to society not… whatever the hell you're doing now."

But of course, like any young adult naive to the realities of the world, I had my sights set on something grander, something that would achieve me excellence, and something that would make me extraordinary. I wanted to be a writer.

As the years went by however, and rejection after rejection from publishers piled up, and I went through minimum wage job after minimum wage job to survive, it became painfully obvious to me that in the end, the reality was, I was just an ordinary man.

It was only last year when I found a modicum of success landing into a contract after pitching a work to my current publishing agent and editor, Mr. Tusin, a friend of my college creative writing professor. It was only a small contract worth $5,000 and 20% sales royalties, enough to pay my living expenses for a few months, but certainly not enough to live anywhere fancier than the small Nothingtown apartment I was already living at. Still, for someone who had done absolutely nothing of worth the last few years, I was ecstatic.

This too though was only a small peak in my otherwise mundane life as only about 3000 copies of my first book sold, barely enough for Mr. Tusin's publishing company to make back their initial investment. Hardly the Ernest Hemingway dream lifestyle I had imagined. Luckily, it was enough for me to land another contract to publish a second book 2 months later, this time however only worth $3000 and 15% sales royalties.

Since then a year had passed and I had 5 books in total published that resulted to a range from mediocre market performance, to outright flops with thousands of unsold copies. Each book was different from the last as I spent endless days doing market research on what was buzzing with the young adult audience. One book on cultivation RPG, one book on fantasy, and one book on mystery, all painfully generic filled with endless character tropes and plot elements seen a million times. Still, what was I to do? Original stories just didn't perform well on the market.

In what was supposed to be the best year of my life turned out to be one of the worst. At this point I kept very few friends as most of them from college had integrated themselves fully into the cultures of their workplace already playing golf with their bosses, drinking at bars on the weekends, and discussing how the new political policies would affect their salaries. That year I spent my time at places like the current park alone. Endless bottles of wine drinking at home made me really question many things. Where was my life going, why I did I decide be a writer in the first place, and most of all, would I ever be extraordinary.

Often times I questioned whether I even enjoyed the process of writing at all, or whether I was just doing so in hopes of becoming rich and famous; shallow reasons that led one to sell out their work like I did in order to cater to the market audience. Perhaps it would have been better for me to go back to graduate school and major in something more useful like my parents wanted such as law, or economics. Even if that was an option however, it had to wait until I finally paid off the remainder of my student loan debt.

I sighed getting up from the bench I was sitting on putting away my laptop into my backpack and hoping onto my bike. As a source of side income, I had been delivering food for various apps that were popular nowadays on my bicycle. This usually started after lunchtime around the current time of day after I had punched away at the keys of my laptop in the morning. This morning however, just like every morning in this past month, the only thing I was punching was the air in frustration. A million ideas ran through my head on what my next story should be; a million voices in my head that told me it wouldn't be extraordinary enough. For the 30th time in a row, the only thing that showed on my laptop was my relaxation music playlist, and an empty word document.

"I really should just give up…" I thought to myself as I began biking for my first delivery. "I'm just ordinary."

But as fate would have it, on the most ordinary of summer days, in the middle of Nothingtown, USA, a new story was about to begin. A real story, that happened in my very real life. The story of a girl, a vagabond girl who gave me a whole new outlook on what it truly meant to be a writer, what it truly meant to have a story, and what it truly meant to be extraordinary.