"...I tripped across a myriad of meridians, poking an inquisitive mind into Lamaism, militarism, surveying, academism, unwieldy soaring planes, atomic phenomenon..."
L. Ron Hubbard
Oh, I can speak of it quite calmly now that the critical point is past, but I dare not look back too searchingly over that period lest I again be seized -- and there seems to be no immunization of a man against bacillus philosophus. I had battered out record wordage -- bagatelles of fifteen thousand words a day -- but never with any continued intensity. And when I discovered that I had written a hundred and thirty-two thousand words in six days for the sole purpose of orienting my mind on a subject ... but then, only a professional fictioneer can appreciate my dismay.
A hundred and thirty-two thousand words and not one single syllable of it intended for the public. This proved too much indeed for one of my reduced health and when I journeyed to New York I took the weighty manuscript along, presenting it for criticism on the off chance that it might be published as-was. No writer can bear to see a manuscript of any kind unsubmitted -- a disease in itself, utterly incurable.
At the start, I had sought to align my own ideas for my own particular benefit. At a very tender age I had begun to manhandle books; subsequently I tripped across a myriad of meridians, poking an inquisitive mind into Lamaism, militarism, surveying, academism, unwieldy soaring plans, atomic phenomena, radio crooning and why Maine is damned with seven kinds of biting flies as well as counting the tin-cans which strew all tropical golden sands and began to annoy my friends by blurting out unwanted intelligences about hydro-statics and politics. This blurting was something on the order of an overcrowded boiler springing a leak and no amount of patching with new ideas served to do anything but apply more pressure. Naturally, sooner or later, the necessity for selecting the pertinent from this knowledge ash-can and discarding the irrelevant would become acute. Only a certain quantity could be disposed of, sugar-coated, in fiction and the out-go failed to keep pace with the in-come. The wailing want of correlation for all these facts which ran the gamut of the knowledge groups had to be met. Thus it was that Excalibur was written.
No book blasted on paper by the scorching heat of sudden inspiration can be decipherable. Whatever the men who cannot make their living writing, and who therefore must teach it, say, inspiration is a dead weight to the fictioneer; in his enthusiasm he leaves holes you could, and do, pitch the villain through.
What I had done was invent a method for the organization of knowledge. Men have been working ceaselessly on the subject of logic for the four thousand years of written history and so there is little anyone can hope to add which can be guaranteed to be original. And so it was impossible to add anything to the methods of logic as such. However, to prove my tenacity to originality for its own sake, I evolved my plan with some confidence and brought it into nebulous being.
The plan itself was simple as you shall see. Not so simple was it to discover. But for years I have been mumbling doggedly to myself, in face of all professorial opposition, that anything which was wholly true was utterly simple, and I had brought it to fruition. I would reduce all the wisdom of the world to a single word and then proceed from there to organize the salient facts. I would construct a symbolic representation of knowledge for the better application of my single word. That was the plan and so well did it work that I sorrily entangled myself by "inventing" or "discovering" obscure laws already in existence but not to my knowledge. (Incidentally, easily the greatest amount of work on the rewriting of this book was in the deletion of those things already established and discovered and well known which I had independently "originated."
