• Disclaimer: No warlords were reformed in the writing of this story.
• Title Origins: The "official" title, as well as the backup title - "You Rang?" - both were actually supplied to me by the GJRS mailing list. Thanks to the little nutballs - I had written the very basic first part of the story, and as usual was stuck for a title, so I sent it out to them and said "Anyone have any ideas what to call it?" and those two were my fave suggestions. ^_^ "For Love" became the official title mainly because I was able to work it into the story. ^_~
• Episode References: For Him the Bell Tolls; A Comedy of Eros
• Chronology: None perzactly. Takes place some time during season three, post-King of Assassins and probably after Forget Me Not, but doesn't tie into any of those plotlines.
• The Subtext Issue: This being the second story that I wrote, it is more or less entirely subtext-free. Looking back I'm kind of surprised, both to see how natural it felt to have a non-texty thing going, and to realize how much I actually did end up sticking subtext into my fics later on. Weird. Eh, I don't regret it either way; it's funny to read this though, 'cause even when I wasn't at all interested in using subtext I was still making little winks at it - like Draco's "Is it because of Xena?" when asking why Gab's not interested in him. ;)
• Thanks be to: Chris S., who beta'd this for me waaaaay back in early 1999. He gave me some great advice, and when I went back over it just before releasing it a couple of weeks ago I realized that everything he said was right. Withouth him this story wouldn't have been polished and released. :)
• Random Info You'll Never Do Anything With: I got the idea for this story around April '98, towards the end of "Xena" season three, after getting very into Phil Hernandez's fanfics. His works were *so* inspiring, and true to the series (of the time); he got me interested in writing fanfics, myself. I'm not actually sure where I came up with the idea to this one, honestly, but Phil was the first person I shared it with and he was VERY encouraging.
• I do remember that my initial idea for the story all pretty much came out of a sort of idle wondering over why Gabrielle was unaffected by the sex appeal of Bell!Joxer in For Him the Bell Tolls, with the exception of the post-kissy swooning. And I thought, well, maybe if she were already USED to suppressing an attraction for him, she'd just react the same way when he was Uber-Sexy and suppress all that much harder? Which isn't necessarily what I think they were trying to say on the show, but as of the time of the writing, I could see it maybe being that way (which was one of the things I liked about the show at the time).
• I realize that Gab in this story comes across as very angry; in both this, and the very first XWP fanfic I ever started working on (and which is still unfinished), Gabby is sort of in perma-bitch mode. But I had a reason, and it's because she often seems to be high-strung around Joxer; mainly I wanted to explore *why* that might be, rather than just make her seem like she's unjustifiably bitchy. Up until late season four, Gab was my favourite character, and I always liked to believe that she was a good person who sometimes let her annoyance take over, rather than a snark with a pole up her butt or something. ^_~
• The ending got quite rewritten. Most of the story was originally written just as seen here, but when Chris reviewed it for me he said that the ending didn't quite jibe with the rest of it. And honestly, I agreed with him. But I put off revising it, because I just couldn't think of HOW to do so. Finally, after three years, it just suddenly came to me, and I finished it up and sent it out. ^_^
• And, last note. *g* My intention here was not to set up a "good guy" and "bad guy" in this story at all. Even Draco, who is the "villain" of the piece, I don't think of as an entirely bad guy. After all, he's motivated by an external force, ie, the love-spell put on him by Bliss; and his feelings for Gab are strong and sincere, if not of his own making. Specifically, though, in the issues between Gabrielle I didn't want there to be a "right" and "wrong". Both of them made mistakes in how they dealt with each other; for each of them, their actions had a "good" and a "bad". Joxer in particular, and his decision, had an issue on both sides of the coin - he saw the spell as having noble intentions, and she saw it as manipulative. And, in the end, they both came to realize that the other was *right* in how they saw it. Because they both were - there were two sides to it. Both are justified, and both make mistakes; I didn't want to force them together by making one of them look good and the other bad, or even by making both of them look perfect. That's not true to the characters, or to life.
• I'm done now. ;)

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