There's No Crying In Baseball

Some of aspiring novelists have very lofty goals for their writing. They seek to be international bestsellers, crafting works of fiction that the whole world will read and recognize, that will integrate into pop culture and be remembered for centuries to come.

If those are your goals, that's fine. To each his own. (Cicero. Now there are some words that endured for centuries. Twenty of them.) Those are not my goals though. I mean, don't get me wrong. If one of my novels ends up that way, I'm not going to say no. It's just not where I see myself going.

Truthfully, at this point I would be psyched to have a real publishing house offer me just about anything to publish one of my novels. Just having my words go into print and show up on the shelf at the bookstore would be amazing.

In the end, I think my goal is to be midlist. To make enough from my writing that I can support it but not enough that people sit in their living rooms with their critique groups and bitch about how crap my work is. (Not that I've ever done that. . . *innocent whistle*)

But beyond the money or the publishing, I will now confess something that has long been one of my most desperate goals: I want to make someone cry.

Yes. I just said that. I want to make someone cry.

I am one of those people who is very susceptible to the emotive content of a story. I have been known to sob at the movies. To blubber at the end of books. I have even teared up while listening to the radio. That last one is dangerous while driving. I don't recommend it.

And I want to be able to do that to someone else. I want my writing to draw them so far into the story, to make them care and invest so much of themselves in the character, that when something sad happens, they really feel it. And they weep. Maybe they don't bawl like a baby, because they're not like that. But they get misty-eyed and possibly there's a sniffle. That would be awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, mission accomplished! The other day, a fellow member of the TriMu (who I will not name here; she can out herself if she wants to, but I don't want to embarrass her, in case she never reads for me again) read the first draft of my latest project and called me to tell me she cried at the end.

Victory is mine! (Points to whoever comments the origins of that one first)