Better or worse, never the same

I work reception at a dental clinic on Calea Victoriei and the particular quality of that work is that everyone who comes in is anxious and nobody wants to be here. My job is to make the waiting room slightly less bad. I am reasonably good at this. I read dark romance because the genre does something that other genres often avoid, which is that it takes the complications of attraction and power seriously without resolving them into something clean. I started writing it in 2021 because I had a specific idea that I couldn't find in what I was reading. The book I'm working on is set in Bucharest, which feels obvious in retrospect, and involves a woman who works in property law and a man who is her most difficult client, and the tension is primarily adversarial before it becomes anything else. I write on my lunch break, thirty minutes, and sometimes on the train home if I get a seat, which is less often than I'd like on the 41 tram. I have 62,000 words of a draft that is not finished but is moving in a direction. I don't talk about it at work because the aesthetic gap between 'dental receptionist' and 'dark romance novelist' is one I'm not ready to bridge with colleagues I see every day. Here it's different.