By asking for stories to critique, there's a good side in that people don't get as pissed off with you. The bad side is that the stories that are submitted are from people who are confident enough in their writing that they are willing to offer them up. They're from people who have already edited the things and already know what they're doing, so it's harder to find what's wrong with them and most of them aren't bad at all.

So what do you say about Kate Bolin? She's well known in the Buffy universe and she's also one of the most prolific writers. People who post a story a week are usually the biggest offenders of bad slash, because they write quickly and get it up just to get reaction. But Kate doesn't. If she does, you can't tell. So even though I can nitpick and find things I would change about Kate's writing, nothing I have read from her would fall under the category of "bad slash." Maybe it's defeating the purpose of this site. I don't know.

I've read essays from people who have called her boring, but I don't find her boring. A lot of slash stories have really absurd premises (see: pregnancy fic) and it just ends up very, very wrong. If you're working on a story with an absurd premise, please stop now, because chances are you're not going to pull it off. The greatest challenge is pulling off a strange idea while keeping in the voice of the characters. This is one of the reasons why, out of all the Buffy fic people sent me and that I read myself, I picked "The Curves of Your Lips Rewrite History." They're out in the middle of the desert and fucking like werewolves and at the same time, you can recognize Xander and Oz amidst it all.

I did two of Kate's stories, just because I read a bunch of them and I figured I might as well comment on them. I did "A Non-Stodgy Moment," a PG fic about Giles being in love with Xander, and "The Curve of Your Lips Rewrite History," which she suggested, about Xander being on a road trip and running into Oz.

So it starts off with a cute description of Giles' father and grandfather. Giles is justifying to himself how hip he is.

In fact, he was far from stodgy. He was as unstodgy as a forty year old English librarian could be. If the kids wanted to see stodgy, they could look at his father, or, God forbid, his grandfather, who always had a cup of tea in one hand and never ever ever removed his jacket or tie except when he went to bed.

ever ever? I know it's supposed to be campy but I had to mention it.

Xander was young, and brash, and impressively American, raised on junk food of the body and junk food of the mind. He knew things that Giles would never need (or want) to know, and strung them together on a deep-fried sugar high that not even the stodgiest of British foods could get him off of.

Nice paragraph of Xander description. The last line is a little awkward, though, and I wasn't entirely sure what she was saying. More often than not, sentences ending in of, to, up or down can be reworked into something better. Also, while I know what she's trying to get at with "junk food of the body and junk food of the mind," it didn't seem to hit as hard as it was supposed to. Sticking a couple of examples into the paragraph would have worked better. What she's trying to get at is something like that he raised on Frito Lays and Aaron Spelling shows. While the repetition was a great try, it would have been better if there were specific examples there. Specific examples are almost always the way to go. But then, that's just my opinion.

Giles had protested getting a TV, citing the noise and the annoyance, and that he wasn't wired for cable, but Xander had his way - primarily by waiting until Giles left the house before getting the house wired and set up for digital cable.

Bit of a run-on and reuse of the phrase "the house." The characters are recognizable. That is something I can see Xander and Giles doing.

Giles sighed, smiling. "I've told you not to call me that," he said, his voice annoyed and yet tender at the same time.

I don't think you need "yet," but that's strictly opinion.

Overall, it's hard to picture Xander and Giles together at all, which I suppose is not a deterrent in the slash world. But this makes it a lot more plausible than other stories I've read. It's a cute story that gets the point across by describing Giles' apartment and how knowing Xander has changed it. Not bad.

The title is a line from the movie Velvet Goldmine and the rock star idea is used in a way that was clever and interesting. It's an interesting portrayal of Xander and uses his G-rated sex obsession from the show and turns it into a bit more of a visceral, blunt, "man's man" sort of quality. The description is erotic as all get out. Example:

It was Oz. Oz looked up at me with lust filled eyes, licking his lips. Oz wanted me. He opened that mouth, that mouth that would look so good around my cock, that mouth that I wanted to drink from, and said in the faintest of whispers, "You're dreaming."

"That mouth that I wanted to drink from" was particularly vivid and blood boiling. Good setup. An encounter between Xander and Oz is already more than plausible. I found it interesting that on the TV show, Oz is the musician, but in Xander's dreams, he's on stage and Oz is in the audience. See what I mean about playing around with the rock star symbolism? I just wish there was more of it. Perhaps near the end there could be a rock star metaphor, like Oz looking at the moon and it lighting his face like a spotlight. OK, that's just off the top of my head, but I hope you know what I'm getting at.

I nodded, trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. "Um...what're you doing here?" Yeah. Blunt. That works. Because I can't figure out why I'm here and why he's here and dear God is this another dream or is it real and I don't know which one is scarier.

That paragraph has a fairly noticeable tense change, from past to present, but it works because it shows how flustered Xander is. His mind is racing and it's straight train of thought, and people don't think in perfect tenses. This is one of the only cases where I think this works. In fact, the whole story reads a little chaotic, but it's in first person and from the mouth of a chaotic mind. But for it to work, it's best if it's deliberate, and in this case I'm sure it is. It's a different story if someone just doesn't know the difference between past and present tense. It is this slightly unhinged, purposely-all-over-the-place quality that makes the story cool and it fits in a tale where one of the characters strips naked and howls at the moon. But the question is, is his bark worse than his bite?