Alan Whytock Smith

Algernon Dearly Loves Patsy was the start.

I was living in Bremen, and spending many evenings in Hegarty's Irish Bar.

One night after several Becks, I could not sleep, and wrote this short story (1 page) where Algernon walks into the store, and sees Patsy Love, tennis starlet, standing in a shaft of sunlight. When he tries to speak to her, she brushes him off sharply, so he drops his wares (a bomb-making kit) and walks out.

The story grew round this - he was in a hardware shop to buy his materials.

But why would the tennis starlet be there? The original twist of Algernon being an arsonist and stalker did not explain her presence.

Then I was out of action for a while following a back op. With nothing else to do but lie in my bed, there was time to think of reasons why she would be there, and once I started to write them down, the next stage was to expand the 1 page story into a larger book. This kept on expanding until I had my first novel, Algernon Dearly Loves Patsy.

It was rough, though. Rough in the middle as well as the edges - it was written in Dundee vernacular, and I had not been in Dundee for some time, so did not really serve its purpose. It was not easy reading.

No matter; I sent my book off to Stephen King, with some background on myself (from Dunning in Scotland). He never got back to me. However I like to think he left a mention for me in 11/22/63 - Harry Dunning writes an essay which is rough and raw, but the English teacher Jake Epping the teacher is affected by it and gives it an A grade. (Even if SK never saw my book, it's a good story)

Anyhow, more recently, I updated it: I took out the vernacular, made up a fictional location - instead of Dundee (although many of the place names remain the same), Sidlaw city was the new setting, and I added a few more hooks for the next book.

This expansion made it about 110,000 words. I eventually got an acceptance by a publisher, but the book price if it went on to publication, would have been too high - who wants to read a new author at 13 pounds a pop? Also, I wanted to extract the first part, and make a separate book of the protagonist Algernon's young life.

So, this is how Algernon Dearly Loves Patsy was retired and two books, a novella of the kids' youth (The Wrath-Wraith), and the full novel of the Sidlaw city psycho and his sister (The Fire-Bird Syndicate), came about.

The next book Comatose Dreaming turned out to be the same problem. Too large, and I had only writtten one chapter from the plan for this next book.

I split it into two - Azuri Blue and Into The Valley, which is about to be published here.

Azuri Blue was then