Marion and Kristoph started as an idea I really wasn’t sure about. I wrote the first two stories and then left them alone for several months before showing them to my friends, Prue. We had been discussing the Theta Sigma stories, and the references from time to time to Chrístõ’s mother who had died when he was only six years old. The Theta Sigma stories had revealed little by little that her name was Marion and that she was a Human who his father, a Time Lord, had fallen in love with. It was revealed that they met on Leeds railway station when he was posing as a literature professor in order to track down a Gallifreyan criminal. Later stories also revealed that the criminal was none other than Chrístõ’s friend, Mai Li Tuo, who had been wrongly accused.

Well, there were obviously some huge questions outstanding about how a Time Lord and a Human got together. So I wrote these first two stories just for an experiment. They were very much in a romantic, almost Mills and Boon style, and quite unlike even the most romantic of the Ninth Doctor and Rose stories. I was nervous about the idea of posting these stories for general reading. But Prue gave me a heck of a lot of encouragement and I decided to give it a go. I set to work on the follow up stories and announced that the story series would be launched at New Year 2007, a year after the Theta Sigma stories began.

The first story is told in retrospective as Marion, the shy young student, gets ready to go out on a ‘date’ with Professor de Leon. She thinks back to meeting him on the way to the summer school in Harrogate.

I especially wanted the reference to Dracula in the story. Kristoph quotes the Count’s reasons for wanting to speak English without an accent so as not to be known as a stranger. Kristoph claims the same need for anonymity. I thought the point about literature being a closed book to so many people was also important. Marion is a working class girl who is struggling not so much with the workload of university, but fitting into the strange, gossipy, cliquey world of university halls. After a year as a student she has no real friends and hasn’t really settle in. She feels out of step and out of fashion.

And then she meets the Professor. She finds him easy to talk to. She accepts the ‘date’ to go and see a Chekov play with him. She thinks about how it isn’t really a date, and how everyone would laugh if they knew she was seeing a middle aged faculty member socially. But she goes and she enjoys herself.

And that was where I left it originally, but with that encouragement to do more, I carried on.