in those stolen moments
where love is caught off guard....
Leo and Ainsley? I would never have put them together. Are you out of your mind?
Quite possibly, yes.
However, when I first saw In This White House, I was totally spoiled. I knew that Ainsley was supposed to be Sam's love interest (I knew of the existence of Bipartisan Relations for example) but when I saw the Capitol Beat scenes, I was underwhelmed.
And then we had the first Leo and Ainsley scene. Know please before you know anything else about me, that I love Leo. Love, love, LOVE that man. Every time I watch Five Votes Down I call Jenny names. And I firmly believe that we can never see enough of Leo. And when he started talking to Ainsley, the whole conversation just drew me right in - the speed of it, the banter, the little smiles that he'd give every now and then. I liked this Leo. And who can forget the immortal exchange -
Leo: You have an interesting conversational style.
Ainsley: It's a nervous condition.
Leo: I used to have a nervous condition.
Ainsley: How did yours manifest itself?
Leo: I drank a lot of scotch.
Ainsley: I get sick when I drink too much.
Leo: I get drunk when I drink too much.
As if that wasn't enough to reel me in, we had the best Leo line ever, in any episode.
Leo: Where are you going?
Ainsley: I'm not going anywhere. I'm standing up, which is how one speaks in opposition in a civilised society.
Leo: Well, you go girl.
By the time Leo came out with, "The President likes smart people who disagree with him. He wants to hear from you. The President's asking you to serve - and everything else is crap," my colours were nailed to the mast. I was a Leo/Ainsley shipper.
A couple of scenes had that effect on you?
At first. But then we had And It's Surely To Their Credit. Look at the first scene where he's telling her that Lionel Tribbey thinks hiring her is a great idea. She knows just by listening to him that he's lying through his teeth.
Ainsley: You haven't told him yet!
Leo: [turns to her, smiling] I have, in fact, not told him yet, no.
Ainsley: So you lied to me just then.
Leo: I'm a politician, Ainsley, of course I lied to you just then.
At this point, I was noting that in the first line above, he was talking just like her. When he took her down to find her office, something, as she pointed out, he didn't have to do as Chief of Staff, I thought that they worked well together. But when she turned to him and told him that she wrote one of the op-ed pieces that had called for his resignation, and he turned to her, casual as you like, and told her that he knew - that said something about the two of them, about how they had something in common in their past, albeit not a nice something, and they each could put it behind them. I saw potential there.
How did you start writing it? Did you plot it beforehand?
Well, the first thing you should know is that it was never meant to be a series. It started out as a post-ep to Noel, which became Of Cookies and Children's Choirs. When I wrote that, I realised that I liked it. And being as I'm in Ireland and was totally spoiled for the rest of the season, I had a thought one day, while sitting in Croke Park at a boring minor Gaelic football match. I realised that I could link Leo's angst in the Noel story to how he'd feel when the MS thing was coming unwound, working in the line about the other shoe dropping. I also knew that that was going to be the first time that they kissed. The same day, the thought occurred to me that if Mrs Landingham reminded Ainsley of her grandmother, then she was going to be devastated when Mrs L died. Which meant instead of one little post-ep, I had a three-story arc.
Three stories? Can you count?
Quite well actually. But what happened was that I realised that much water must have passed under the bridge between Noel and Bad Moon Rising. Presumably they didn't stay in that holding pattern, they must have got closer by degrees. And I also had the thought that something must have happened to get them to where they were in the Noel post-ep. Which is why I decided to do the first two stories, Reports, Statistics and Divine Intervention and Of Divorces and Desserts. And a whole host of stories in between.
Why did you wait so long before they kissed?
Because I knew when I first started that their first kiss was going to be in The Other Shoe. As far as I was concerned, it had already happened right that way, and I could no more change it than I could fly to the moon. The fact that it left so many people hanging was unfortunate. Really. I mean that.
Why "Stolen Moments"?
You can blame Flip for that one. I was searching for an arc name anyway, and I came across her story Living Legacies, which is a songfic based around Leader of the Band by Dan Fogelberg. Now, I knew that I had that on a double Dan Fogelberg CD, The Innocent Age, and Flip's story got me wanting to hear it again. So I listened to the first CD non-stop, then moved on to the second one. The first song on that is Stolen Moments. And the lines about In these stolen moments, when love is caught off guard, we see it never had to be this hard just leaped out at me. It seemed to fit the series, because it was comprised of post-eps, but I was always so careful to work within the confines of canon - I worked really hard to get my facts right. I wanted this to be something that you could read, and then watch the episodes and feel like you knew something else that was going on in the background. I also wanted to convey the notion that neither Leo nor Ainsley expected this to happen. That it just snuck up on them without them realising it.
Why was Through Another's Eyes written the way it was?
Once I got talked into taking the series on to season three (which I resisted by the way, and have the emails to prove it - see the Inside the Tornado Author's Notes) I really wanted to tie off Stolen Moments. That way, anyone who wanted to stop at the end of Stolen Moments could, without feeling that they were missing anything. Plus, that would keep the whole thing the way I originally wanted to do it - I wanted to have a series of pieces that could stand on their own as an arc, and be totally within the confines of canon. I knew that I couldn't do that though and do it from Leo or Ainsley's point of view. And I was trying to write the Two Cathedrals stories, trying to work out how I'd wrap it all up, and I was re-editing More Than Like, when I realised that the waitress knew them, and had given them their order without taking it. I also recalled that she'd been very nice to Leo in The Pieces of My Life. This was the point that the door opened and in walked Rachel (and I know she's not named in the story, but trust me, that's her name) and she told me all about her life, and about the two people that she'd been eyeing up for months. Her story seemed to round off the arc perfectly, so I let her tell it. Huge thanks must go out at this point to Bluejeans, who spoiled me just enough that I could write something that took in the events of Manchester without having seen the episode! I also decided that I had to get the song in there somewhere, to prove where the arc name came from. And as for the final line - that was total tongue in cheek meta-commentary. Wasn't going to do it, but got the idea and couldn't resist it.