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Remember in "Romancing the Stone" where Joan Wilder is finishing writing her book, tears streaming down her face?

Been there, done that. If your emotional scenes don't wrench a reaction from you, how can you expect them to move your readers? There's a scene in Captain Sinister's Lady that still makes my eyes moist when I read it, and the scene I was working on today in A Sea Change made me cry.

Good news is I don't write scenes like that very often. Angst is all well and good, but my goal is to make my readers laugh, not cry. At least, not cry very often. And certainly not cry when they should be laughing.

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