Primrose Road

When some people are 19 years old, they drink / eat / smoke / sleep too much; when I was 19 years old, I :

1. Allowed a teen literary magazine that had published a (ba-a-ad) short story I wrote to reprint the story for a book collection and not pay me any royalties;

2. Published my college creative writing portfolio as a short story collection through a vanity press that was allowing employees of the chain bookstore at which I worked to publish for free as long as we talked the press up to customers;

3. Tried to establish an Internet presence in order to sell the above book;

4. Won 7th place in a vanity-press-promoting writing magazine's playwriting contest.

Before I started my Ph.D. program, I wrote a letter to the vanity publisher asking them to discontinue the book; they sent me back a letter informing me that they had. The book is still listed as for sale with several online booksellers, however, and this suggests to me that the publisher might be still willing to print a copy for those willing to pay (including my friend G., who last year ordered a copy solely for the purpose of taunting me; unfortunately, my attempt to feed the book to his cat failed miserably). And it's EVERYWHERE.

This concludes reason #8,756 why young, naive, "Yay, I'm a WRITER!"s shouldn't fall for vanity publishing schemes.

Also, this serves as reason #4,922 why we need a web service called "Eraseyourpast.net."

And reason #885 why the laws of physics need to be changed so that a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate can punch her 19-year-old self in the face.