"In April, I woke up one morning, out of the blue, and there was a sort of voice in my head, not exactly a voice, but sort of a telepathic thing, saying, "You will now write the Purple Fables, there will be four of them, and you will do one in each day and the title is to be Purple Fables," and I said okay...they were sort of dictated from somebody else, someplace, I guess. The Purple Fables happened in April of 1993, but on Christmas morning I woke up and there were these guys again, or these whatever, saying "Okay now you are going to write a thing called the Tale of the Master of Harmlessness and it's to be seventy-six draft pages in length," which is actually the length of all four Purple Fables put together, "and you are to work on it for certain hours in the day, and it will all be done by New Year's." And in fact it was done and printed out and sit there in manuscript form on December 31st.

-- Ingo Swann