What is my ultimate goal as a writer? To write something so freaking good that an astronaut chooses to bring it into space to read during all the lonesome downtime, but then something goes wrong on the mission, and there's too much weight on the craft, and there’s lights flashing and klaxons blaring as the astronaut is forced to tearfully eject my book out into space before they can read it, and then they are forced to watch it burn up as it reenters the atmosphere, and also it was the only copy of that piece of writing in existence, and when they return to earth they are forced to lie to me and tell me it was the greatest thing they ever read, but, unfortunately they had to use it to patch some kind of hole in the spacecraft and, even now, it’s holding the entire space station together, and I win the Nobel Prize because the Nobel Prize committee has added a new category for books that are both impeccably written and visionary and also used physically in the real world to save lives or accomplish some kind of tangible purpose, like being a doorstop for a very important door, or hitting someone in the back of head who was about to kill someone, knocking them out cold, or, as I said, fixing a hole in a space station. But no one knows the book didn’t actually do this and was never even read. It’s only the astronaut’s testimony that the prize committee has based their evaluation on, and they trust the astronaut implicitly, as do I.