Now before you get all harsh and judgmental on my wee bit of prose you need to know one important fact, I wrote it when I was fifteen years old. Not sure where my worldly, looking back on it perspective came from but I did read a lot of Dickens as a child.
It is also noteworthy to add that this was my first published work. Long before the days of the Internet, when you actually had to read trade journals to understand a business, I used my allowance to subscribe to every publishing related magazine available. One day a card came in the mail with the invitation to enter a poetry contest and win the chance to be published! I was thrilled. There was no entry fee and I could submit as many works of poetry as I wanted. I had many in my collection to choose from as I had spent that entire summer banging out poems left and right on the raggedy old typewriter I had picked up at a tag sale for $15. In the end I decided I wanted to pick just one so as to make the strongest statement of my young literary career.
Later I was heartbroken to find out the contest was nothing more than a way to get a bunch of people to buy a book with a bunch of other people's poems surrounding their one. I remember my father coldly laying out the harsh facts to me. However, his pragmatism didn't stop me from begging him to buy me a copy of the anthology. Maybe it was a scam but that didn't change the fact that for the first time I could see my words in black and white and on a page I could bookmark for easy future reference!
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