It was the Great Gale of Winter 1893, and the natural forces of snow and ice had taken over Tiverton, Massachusetts. A chill was in the air, along with the sense that anything, anything at all could be brought in along with the piercing winds. 

How anything so sinfully terrific happened to me I may never know, and yet it is still the case. Somehow, through the blustery snow a letter came, three to be precise, and I had barely gone about the business of reading them all day, as I was busy finishing what I felt would be the next great American novel. 

It was a task I had felt I was singularly capable of, as having been turned down by almost every publisher, and without a single word of encouragement from my long since distant family, there could not have been a single author more familiar with failure. A failure however I was determined to not become, as what is failure but an opportunity to learn for those who are still young? Still the scars of defeat had not fully healed, and having had to feel them again, and again, I was determined more than ever in my life to prove them all wrong.

However, through general misfortune, the kind i believed in, in those days,it had gotten to the point that by the time of my receiving the letters, I was destitute. The kind of poor where you wear the same thing everyday, any day. Not because you are lazy, or because you are sick, no those are lies passed down by the least savory of my entitled peers. The truth was I had a choice, and between the basic necessity to eat, and the tools needed to wash, I had chosen to live. I had, had that much going for me, before those letters arrived, I wanted to live.