De La Soul would have you believe that 3 is the magic number, but they and Aleister Crowley are wrong.

10,000 is THE magic number!

It is the milestone that counts, the progress marker from which all others hang.

It is the point, when reached, that allows you to relax a little as the story now has a beginning, has structure and the genesis of the plot etched onto the computer screen.

The blinking cursor now transformed into an impatient friend, no longer a tormenting Audrey loudly screaming “Feed Me Seymour Feed Me!”

10,000 words safely extracted from your chaos of your head, from which the impatient imagination that is thousands more words further down the line can now try to structure a joined flowing narrative.

A collection of phrases, fights, demons and blood splattered saloons all now have purpose, all now have space to tell their tales – and that is liberating. 

The first 10,000 take forever, the next 10,000 are impatient words released from the pressurised confine that now flow faster and faster from cortex to keyboard. 

Plots will flow, will expand, be titivated, be nudged to an acceptable and readable form, and some will be abandoned before after or during this process, but, it is the first 10,000 words that count.

A foundation is now complete.

Amy Grace of County Leitrim, by way of Cairo, Khartoum, Peshawar the North West Frontier and so many other places after these, is safely in New York – and nobody has died. 

Although so is Ebenezer Cochran – so, hey let’s not discount a reasonable body count just yet!