Welcome to the Ultradark
It's December in Berlin! What should I do with my life?
Well it’s that time of year again, folks. The time when I wake to the cheerful chime of my alarm and open mine eyes that I might behold the dull grey nonsense of December. Will the semilight that shrouds my room at eight be brighter by the time I trudge outside, having snoozed and shuffled through my flat for 90 minutes more?
No, it will not, because it’s raining and has been raining and will mostly continue to be raining. And when it’s sunny, that sun only feels like actual sun from about 11 to maybe 2:30. Because Berlin.
So yes, ‘tis the season of the gloom, though I have to say I’m handling it better than I did last year. Some of this is definitely that my overall mental health is better, and I think it’s also (relatedly) that since moving into my own place and developing better routines around coworking/socializing/domesticity, my life is just more pleasant. I make a lot of soup.
However, I’ve had to stop dance classes due to a hamstring (tendon?) injury I got last March and then very wisely ignored for months. It’s been improving with aggressive acupuncture and more careful workouts, so I’m hoping I can resume in January. My extremely hot ballet teacher also gives an R&B-based “sensual jazz” class once a week, because she is (of course) also a professional burlesque dancer. I took it once just before my leg went into open rebellion, and let me tell you, this is the way to sex up a winter self-care routine. It is never too late to be Beyoncé, kids. Especially if you can also be goofy about it.
Spackle Queen
In other news, work has been shit in the last couple of months. There’s usually a slowdown around this time of year, but this year it has been bad, and I’d like to say it’s not worrying me but it’s worrying me a little. And of course it’s coinciding with extra expenses: finally replacing the dying laptop I’ve had since 2017, finally buying a dining table and a couple of other things to make my apartment more pleasant and hospitable. I’m doing it all as cheaply as I can, but it adds up.
Due to my general lack of funds, the winter nesting impulse has also involved a bit of a DIY kick. I took over the previous tenant’s lease, which meant taking the place “as is” - i.e. inheriting the detritus of some very heavy-duty shelving installations. My building is prewar and the walls are solid, and some of those anchors were so stuck that I couldn’t get them out with pliers - so I figured I should hire someone, and then never did. A few days ago I finally got so sick of looking at them that I ordered a crowbar.
So I will be prying and spackling this weekend, in addition to assembling the dining table and making more chili and possibly rearranging my lamps for the third time in two weeks. You know what’s a great word? Spackle. Spackle-spot. Spackle-speck. Spackle-spree. Endless possibilities.
The place also needs a paint job so, so badly, but I legitimately don’t want to do a full paint job on my own. Even with Lyz Lenz cheering me on. So that’s not going to happen until I have money to burn and the urge to devote real brain space to choosing colors - which, me being me, will likely come on suddenly and violently some months in the future, when I’m trying to avoid dealing with something else.
A concluding rant
So, a few days ago for the work I do have, I had to read an airport thriller that hinged on a particularly braindead version of Slut Who Got Herself Murdered By Doing Whore Stuff - written by a woman, lest you misplace your outrage. Safe to say this lady did not get the In the Cut memo.
I read a lot of mass market stuff that is objectively not-great: plot outlines strung together by frictionless, functional sentences, populated by noncharacters. Occasionally I find them quite diverting. But this was very objectively not-great, even by those standards. In addition to a truly extreme level of blandness, there were all kinds of craft problems - jerky dialogue, scenes stuck in places they don’t belong, etc. - that made it legitimately clumsy to read. Also, the misogyny.
So, when I was done, I googled it because I was curious if it had been written up anywhere, and I found out it had been a bestseller in multiple countries.
You might assume that this filled me with rage and despair, but it mostly didn’t - aside from the general kind that tends to flare when adult women are socially rewarded for calling other woman whores, while being too respectable to just come out and use that word.
But it mostly just made me, not for the first time, bellow “whhyyyyyy don’t I just subsidize my life by writing junk novels under a pen name?”
When I was living in Los Angeles I had a very fascinating neighbor who made extra money by writing gay porn novels, and he not-at-all-jokingly recommended that I should do this too, as according to him a fair number of gay porn writers are secretly women. I’ve thought about this more than once since - but less about porn books and more about potboilers generally. Like I’m sure I could get the hang of it with some practice - I can break down a plot in my sleep by this point, and I can string together highly readable (if not deeply artful) sentences very quickly and without much effort, because I do it literally all day.
And it wouldn’t have to be junk junk - like you wouldn’t catch me dead writing the kind of rape apologist nonsense I read the other day. But some sort of paint-by-numbers genre stuff that I could find ways to make fun for myself, and that may or may not involve sex scenes if I feel like it. I do, in fact, write really good sex scenes, which I know is true because I’ve been told so on multiple occasions.
So should I do this? Serious question, because I’ve reached the end-of-year, low-on-funds frustration place where I’m crowdsourcing my readers for career advice. I’m also bored. And I am once again reckoning with the finances of the other stuff I want to create: two novels that would be Big Five stuff but are basically literary, and another project that would be indie press stuff, if I made it that far with it.
Also: live life. Paint my walls. Take dance classes. Go someplace warm.