"A higher level of consciousness?" I repeated. "I'm not sure I follow."

"What was special about the year 2000? Like you said, it was just a nice round number. Seen in an objective light, it means nothing. But how could the number 2000 begin to have some meaning? It would have to be connected to something that was important to you."

Tuck touched a finger to his lips as an example came to his mind. "Actually, let's get away from 2000 as a year for a minute. Let's say you're writing your first novel. You want it to be 50,000 words, because that's a nice round number, and it's also about the minimum word count for something to really be considered a novel. And let's say you want to write the whole thing in 30 days, because you think that having that built-in time pressure will keep you focused the whole time, letting you make progress far faster than you would without a deadline."

It was interesting that he was talking about writing my first novel, since I had actually been thinking about that. Maybe some kind of sci-fi mystery thriller, filled with both science and mysticism, where the end of the world is just around the corner, and the bad guy turns out to be who you least suspect. But I didn't see where he was going with this.

"To write 50,000 words in 30 days," Tuck continued, "how many words per day does that work out to? It would have to be about 1,600 or 1,700. But you don't want to cut it too close. You know that life will get in the way, that things will come up and you might not have time to work on it every day. You'd better shoot for a little higher than the bare minimum. So you decide that you're going to set a target of 2,000 words a day."

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