Welcome to my perfumed garden

Mine's about your recent AU - the Gypsy Blair one. Did you have the whole small town background in mind when you started? Or did it just turn out that way? And how different was the finished tale to what you imagined it would be?

Ooh, the gypsy tale! There’s a bit of a story behind that.

My partner, Mark, is a bit of a joker. Before he knew Garett’s name, he used to refer to him as ‘the little gypsy chap.’ This sort of developed into this whole little world, in which Garett/Blair lived in a caravan and sold pegs and heather ::hee:: The way Mark would described it, in tremendous detail, had me in stitches every time. So I passed the idea on to a couple of friends, along with a mildly erotic description of ‘Gypsy Blair’, sitting on the steps of his caravan (this was a traditional, painted, horse-drawn Romany caravan, of course). Said description seemed to do something to Sue’s circuits and she kept demanding more (o: When she didn’t get anymore, she bid on my ‘AU of your choice’ and demanded I write the story.

So, with all that in mind - to get back to your actual question ::G:: - I struggled for a while, trying to find a world to put Gypsy Blair in. The original idea was a WW2 story set in Amsterdam, but I couldn’t make it work and gave it up.

Then I caught a clip of a film Richard was in – don’t ask me which; the clip’s on The Wonder Tape – where he plays a hard-ass sheriff intimidating some poor guy in a diner, and the idea of Sheriff Jim came to me. I so saw Blair, in his old hippie van, breaking down in some small town, somewhere… Thinking ‘Cascades’, I was reminded of all those twee little ski resort towns full of 6 bedroom log ‘cabins’ and up-market stores, and - it all started to come together then.

So – it was very different from the WW2 tale I originally envisaged, and actually, quite different in the end, from the small town story I started out with. All I knew when I started, was that Blair would have been ‘shamanised’ by his trip to The Other Side and that he’d go to work in a little alternative coffee shop. I’d already planned for Jim to be this aggressive type of Sheriff, who just didn’t want Blair in his town, but that he’d grow to love him ::G::

But the whole story of Marla, Sugar and the coffee shop, Red and Marla’s abuse, the nattering Ghost of Naomi and all that had happened to her and Blair - all of that just arose as I wrote it. I had no plans to take the story that way at all.