December 2000

I said I'd never write this.

I seriously mean that. I can show you emails that I wrote to people, can get my friends to attest to the fact that I swore up down all around, black blue and blind that Stolen Moments was a stand-alone thing, that I was taking it up to Two Cathedrals and it was going no further, and that no power on this earth was going to make me take it into season three.

You can stop laughing now.

What you have to know, is that Stolen Moments wasn't supposed to be the series that it became.

Seriously. I can't tell you why I became a Leo/Ainsley shipper. Although I will say that having known that Ainsley was supposed to be Sam's love interest, I was underwhelmed with the chemistry between them in the start of In This White House. (Shoot me not, it's just how I saw it!) And then I saw the job interview with Leo. Now, I'm a Leo fan anyway. And I thought the chemistry between them was fantastic. (I get sick when I drink too much. I get drunk when I drink too much.) Not to mention the fact that any scene that gets Leo McGarry to say, "You go girl" deserves a special mention. And I looked for Leo/Ainsley fic, but couldn't find any.

So I thought I'd give it a go. Which is where things start going haywire.

It all started off as the Noel post-ep, done as a stand-alone. And then, being so thoroughly spoiled for the latter half of season two, I thought, "Hey, I could link that story with the events of Bad Moon Rising." Which is why you have the thing about the other shoe dropping.

And then I thought, "Hey, I could do something with 18^th and Potomac. After all, didn't Ainsley say something about her grandmother reminding her of Mrs Landingham?"

And then I thought that some back-story might be needed to get them to where we found them in Of Cookies and Children's Choirs. And that I might as well fill in some blanks between that and The Other Shoe.

And then I started posting it, and wonder of wonders, people started emailing me, telling me that they liked it, even telling me that they'd never considered Leo and Ainsley as a couple but that I was converting them. (Yes, if you sent me an email saying that, you really weren't on your own!) And people, and you know who you were, started wondering about how people would react when they found out. Co-workers, and family and so forth.

How I laughed, in my innocence, thinking that I wasn't going to do any such thing. One poor reader even got an email postulating over what would happen next and received an email with the words "Barking. Wrong Tree. You" in it.

I apologise for those comments.

Because lo and behold, the spoiler free thing isn't working out great for me right about now. (For which I blame the great fanfic writers out there. Nothing to do with my lack of willpower.) And today I just got the West Wing Women List December challenge, which would fit in great as a sequel to Of Cookies and Children's Choirs , set a year later. This isn't counting the plot bunnies that have bit for the bits of Season Three that I already know about.

And then I got an idea for the arc name and here we are.

So, here's the deal. I'm Irish, and won't get to see Season Three until April, Easter, whenever RTE, our national broadcast station get with it. That means you're looking at around probably June before I get a post-ep out - I like to have a couple of stories in reserve, in case of writers block, or needing to back-engineer myself a point of continuity.

Until then, the December challenge mentioned above will be a part of the Eye of the Storm arc. It's just not going to have a number until I know how many I write for the first few episodes of Season Three. And just watch me work around my lack of knowledge of Season Three and not having seen Bartlet for America (which I understand is the name of this year's Christmas episode.) Oh dear me, the tap-dancing is going to be fun. And I reserve the right to edit it in the summer.

So Stolen Moments itself finishes with Through Another's Eyes. It can be read as a whole, complete body of work, an arc unto itself. Eye of the Storm will take it into Season Three, but if you're burned out on Stolen Moments and don't care what happens with Leo and Ainsley in Season Three, then Stolen Moments can happily end your voyage!

Thus endeth the Author's Notes. Thanks to all who have read the series thus far, even if I did kill some of you with waiting for them to get together…I hope you enjoyed the journey, and I look forward to hearing from you all again!

March 2001

And then there came the second set of notes, the ones that came when I actually began to write the series.

See when I wrote the notes for this, I didn't know that someone was going to take pity on me and send me a tape. I didn't know that someone would be that kind/generous/ desperate to see what happens next (Delete as appropriate). But you should all know that the words "will" and "power" do not go together greatly with me, so I wasn't about to say no. So I got the tape. And I watched the tape. And I smothered in plot bunnies for this and other stuff, but I'm still here!

At this point, I've only seen up as far as 100,000 Airplanes, but that's still plenty enough to get me started. And one of the advantages of seeing 11 episodes in three days (12, if you count that I watched Bartlet for America twice) is that you end up with things like plot and arc and continuity, and all those nice things that drive readers mad!

So, I'm thinking of what I can do with the characters, or should I say, the characters are telling me what I'm going to do with them, and I suddenly am hit with the sweeping realisation that Eye of the Storm is not going to cut it as a series name. It's just not.

This is going to get dark.

It's going to get angsty.

It's going to be a bumpy ride.

And having the tag line "It’s the only place that's calm" is surely false advertising under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Are you annoyed yet?

So, I'm going along through the internet, looking at my favourite sites, all the while half on the lookout for a series name that I can use. And I find details of the newest album by one of my favourite singers, Amanda Marshall. Not that I have this album yet, because it's not out here yet, but I manage to find the lyrics of the new songs.

And themes being what they are, the one entitled Inside the Tornado caught my eye.

The shriek of "Eureka!" heard in my immediate locality thereafter may or may not be coincidental.

I print the lyrics here in their entirety, words and music by Amanda Marshall and Billy Mann, from the album Everybody's Got A Story.

Theme song baby!

Plus new series name and tag line...not a bad night's work if I do say so myself.

So, I know where this is going. And AU is more than likely part of it. This series also isn't going to follow the same pattern as Stolen Moments, ie, one post-ep per episode, sometimes two. It's going to be a little more scattered, a little more all over the place, and it's going to make use of more of the supporting characters, not just Leo and Ainsley.

I say again, if you don't want to read it, I won't be offended.

But if you do read it, don't blame me.

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