Francisco Stork: Hello, my name is Francisco Stork and I'm the author of I am Not Alone.

People often ask me how I get ideas for my books, and for I am Not alone, I think it started off as a small seed that grew eventually to become a full-bodied character who I called Alberto. And it was the idea of a young man who heard a voice one day, and it was a voice that did not come from outside of his mind. It came from inside his mind, and it was a voice that he could not control.

And so this is the idea that I had, you know, for many, many years. The idea of a young boy hearing a voice. And then I thought, well, how can I develop that? And slowly it became clear to me that this boy, this young man, had a full personality and I wanted to give him something special. And so I gave him the ability to work with clay and the ability to love working with clay. And in fact, when he worked with clay and pottery and made pots and sculptures, it was the only time that the voice could not come to him.

So slowly what became the seed of a young man hearing a voice grew into a full-blown personality is someone that was a real person and not just an idea. And that was important to me because hearing a voice can be a symptom of a mental illness. And sometimes when we encounter people with mental illnesses, all we can do is focus on the symptom and, kind of, ignore the person that is behind the symptoms.

But people with mental illnesses are like you and me. They like to play sports, they like to have fun, they like to be with other people. And so, what happens in this book is that you become acquainted with a real person who probably is suffering from a mental illness, and the mental illness becomes less scary. So I'm hoping that you will get to know Alberto and you will get to be friends with them as you read the book.

The book is both a thriller and a love story. I mean there is a person that falls in love with Alberto, and her name is Grace, and she has to make some big decisions whether to get involved with someone who has a mental illness. So that's, kind of, the story of this slow developing love between two young people as well as some of the other things that we mentioned before.

This is from chapter one, Time to Be Free.

Alberto opened his eyes when he heard the voice. He was in bed, the great light of dawn outside his window. There was no one else in his room. It was the same voice he had heard a dozen or so times the past month, a man's voice. Not angry, not loud, not like when Wayne yelled at him to do something. The voice was insistent, nagging, high-pitched sometimes.

Alberto didn't fear what it said or how it sounded as much as the fact that it was there. So real, there was wet on his temples, on his legs.

The first time Alberto heard the voice, he was riding the subway. The voice whispered, "I got you." Alberto thought there was someone behind him, but there was no one close to him. Sometimes the voice came when he was working, and sometimes when he was holding baby Chato. And now here it was again, telling him it was "time to be free", whatever that meant.

A dream? Lupe once told him that one day he would even dream in English. Had the six months of evening classes at Brooklyn College finally paid off? But if the voice was a dream, even if it was in English, why was he trembling? The voice in dreams are invisible. This voice shone like a neon light.