I read six books in December and in January I read six more. I am 32,847 words into the book I started writing at the beginning of November, and I’ll write today’s text fast so the new words I woke up thinking about can join the rest of them already there.

Neon orange scarf up past my chin, 4 degrees. It takes 11 minutes to walk to the gym. Another 17 to stretch. The mask makes my glasses fog when I bend my head to my knees, and I feel all the veins inside me ping. I’m six months into an eight month cardiology rehabilitation programme; I used to only be able to do 3 minutes on a rowing machine but now I can go for 45 minutes on the elliptical. On Tuesday, I did the full hour. I force my feet backwards every ten minutes before they go numb. Keep my headphones on. Watch the LED clock blink because it’s better than looking straight ahead.

It’s just that there are all these TVs spaced a metre apart across the walls of the gym. They cycle between recipes for carrot cake, news stories about Ant and Dec’s mental health, riddles, and then very long montages of award-winning GoPro footage shot in first-person. It’s extreme sport shit. People jumping off mountains, sky-diving. Wing suits flying through valleys of very sharp rocks, or aiming for one tight hole in a rock formation somewhere high up over a red-gold desert.

This was a problem at first. When the camera, strapped to someone’s head, titled the whole world, I went with it. My body in motion on the elliptical, I experienced a wave of vertigo I’ve never got from those kinds of videos sitting down and kept thinking I was going to fall off the machine. But I’ve seen them all a hundred times since then. I no longer feel like I’m falling. It’s just a distraction in my periphery. Screensavers for people who never sleep.

And then on Tuesday, I saw a pop-up that said the telly was gonna turn off in five minutes. Then one minute, and it was gone. I watched the app on my phone where I can read the heart monitor I have around my arm instead. The highest it’s gotten to is 181. But on Tuesday, I was only in the 40s. Could be a sign of progress. That, or the audiobook I was listening to, which was slower and still, like numbers coming to an end. Like the cooldown after a TV has finally been turned off.

Over the past few years I’ve seen lots of people reading ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ by the late Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman. I never went for it because with a title like that, I wondered what everyone was doing reading an essay. But it’s fiction. 1995. The exact kind of story I like. It’s about a girl who lives in a caged room with 39 other women. They don’t remember how they got there. Don’t know where they are. Don’t know why they’re being kept or if they’ll get out. 40 mattresses on the ground, two exposed toilets in the middle of the room, three male guards armed with whips.

And this girl counts her heartbeat because there’s no other way to tell the time.

I’m reading so much these days because I am afraid of writing a boring book. When that girl was voted the blandest contestant on Traitors the other week, I thought if that’d happened to me, it would change the direction of my entire life. With every book I read, I watch for the things I find boring, or stuff that’s the total opposite, so I can calibrate my taste and aim.

Like, I don’t want to be as repetitive in my language as Alice Slater’s Death of a Bookseller, which was my first book of the year. Don’t want all my characters to grate to the point where I’m left not wanting to speak to anyone, because that’s boring too. Although I would like to write a workplace as established as she does where a shift really feels like a shift. Shin splints, lockers. Where boredom, when it’s needed, can be a texture. A heavy air.

Last week, I read Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits and knew I wanted my writing to come with an accent; wanted characters with a level of chispeza they don’t even appreciate — all that cheek and charm and wit. His book is singular, because the language has chispeza too. And I want that. Because I don’t want the language to be the same as every book, where an AI prompt could write the rest of it for me. Though there was a love story in that book that felt like it was happening around the corner, and I thought, if it’s gonna be there — if it’s gonna be in mine — I want the vertigo of those stupid GoPro videos.

On the first page of Brian Catling’s Earwig, you meet a girl who has no teeth so she decants her spit, freezes it in a special mould, and inserts frozen spit-teeth back into her mouth. Every two hours, they melt and she has to begin the process again. I thought this opening was so un-boring I told everyone about it, and decided I shouldn’t be a writer working on a novel; I should be closer to an artist when I write, like Catling. Yeah. I want imagery that doesn’t always need to be explained, but that still does something for being there. Something like collage. A run through a sculpture park.

And ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ should have been so fucking boring. That’s the thing. It’s got that stretched out, real pace of an internal monologue because there’s nothing for the main character to do but think, and yet it works. I read it so fast, and it had that effect of making me feel like I was already on my second or third read. Soaked through somehow.

It’s weird. I don’t tend to like writing full of questions. It makes me think the writer is phoning it in. But Harpman manages to ask a whole story’s worth without the book becoming simply a very long list. I think she pulled it off because questioning becomes the very material the girl is made of. Personality reveals itself through logic, and that’s how she starts wondering about time, and why she counts heartbeats in lieu of a clock — so young when she got to the bunker, she doesn’t remember ever seeing one before.

I really like this focus on logic. It makes reading the book feel like learning how to tie a knot you could never have figured out yourself but when it’s done, and tight, with all those curves holding together like a piece of art, there’s a very long-lasting satisfaction.

And so, I think for me, reading was a lesson in how slowing down and explaining yourself and being specific to the point of counting upwards from zero doesn’t have to make for a boring book. And actually, I could do with slowing my own book down. I know you haven’t read it, but in those first ten chapters I’ve got in the word document tucked behind this one, I’ve been hurrying my character along. I haven’t been letting her have her say. I’ve been so scared of writing a boring book that I haven’t let my main character be first person enough.

I guess with four years spent in and out of bed, not well enough to do much of anything, boredom is something I am now finally able to run away from and maybe this new book has become embroiled in that? I don’t want energy-saving mode, I want to spend it. And at the same time, I don’t need the book I’m writing to keep pace with me. The success of ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ rests in the detail, not blurring motion; and I know very well that watching the same POV shot of different men jumping off similar mountains over and over again can become boring in its own way.

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