A lot of people have asked where I got the inspiration forThe Inconvenient Need to Belong. The kernel of the idea started many years ago, when I was still living in Perth, Australia. In an ill-judged and short-lived period of my life where I was going for early morning runs, I would run through a little park that had what could only really be described as a large pond with ambitions to be a lake.
To keep my mind off the burning in my legs and lungs, as I ran I would make up stories in my head of the people I passed in the park. And one morning there happened to be an old man sitting on a bench by the water feeding a few of the ducks with some bread. And so Alfie was born...
It originally started life as a short story, set entirely in the present day with just Alfie and Fred on the bench. And in fact, I never even finished it, writing myself into a corner that was too hard to get out of - the perils of winging it!
In the first draft of the novel, I spent the first half of the first chapter describing that park. The other runners, the way the mist would hang above the lake in the early morning in winter. And then my editor, thankfully, told me to cut all of that out and actually get on with the story.
I could never have imagined, on that morning huffing my way around the park so many years ago, what Alfie would become. How he'd come to be so alive to me, so real. How he'd stay with me all through the day after I'd been writing early in the morning.
Early reviews have said something similar: how Alfie touched them and would stay with them. I hope if you read Alfie's story, that he will stay with you too.
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