secondalto has written for me my very own Giles/Buffy/Xander threesome story for my boithday. Get your copy right here! Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! I had a problem this afternoon with a little too much personal projection into that situation.

Thank you! Thank you!

Or fic postpromulgatios or something like that.

The problem with "Emergence" is that all the conflict is internal, and that's never as interesting as when it's external, or an internal conflict is commented upon by an external conflict, or whatever. The question is "will he get over himself and get together with her", and the answer is obviously "yes" from the first moment. All the fun has to come from the journey from the start to the end, and dunno if there's enough of that fun there. If you're a B/G shipper, quite possibly. I did enjoy writing it, and I think it has some nice moments and is sweet. But there's not enough at stake. Nobody suffers.

"Emergence" is put to bed. Lessons learned; time to move on.

The problem with the Core Four fic is structural. I wrote myself into a corner and ended up with all the sex from the viewpoint of only two characters, leaving two of our heroes out in the cold. And alas, one of those viewpoints is Willow, and my Willow voice is shaky. I definitely had to end with the Giles-viewpoint segment, because everything builds toward that. (Note that the structure is out of balance anyway!) But I ought to have found a way to write the sex from everybody's viewpoint. And the sex incidents need to build emotionally to the final Giles sequence. Also need to build in intimacy. Maybe a mirror thing: G, X, B, W, smut begins, W, B, X, G. I might revise this story just to see how much better it would be structured that way. Also, it would be fun to write smut from Xander's pov, because I think that boy has a nice dirty mouth.

My first try at writing slash, and I think it came out okay. I do confess to wimping out on the f/f stuff and not being direct and sensory enough. If I try the structure above, that section would be in Buffy's pov, and I think Buffy wouldn't let me get away with being meta. Buffy just isn't meta, the way Giles and Willow can be. And yet, the Giles segment is actually the most tactile of all the sex writing. Possibly because I'm feeling comfortable writing the Giles-voice. Hmm.

So I think that one will get another draft in a while.

I am embarrassed to say that instead of doing anything useful yesterday, like cleaning the house or putting books away or cataloging my lint collection, I wrote and nearly completed a draft of my own pervy Core Four fic. It surprised me by being most definitely smut, and smut of a kind that I have never written before and hadn't thought myself likely to write. (I enjoy reading it, but when I write I tend to want to blur the hydraulic details as being less interesting than other things I could be describing.) It is not pr0n, however, because it's definitely a story with character development and a moment of change brought about by the encounter between the four of them.

Well, okay, it's probably pr0n.

It's also much less G/B-ish than I would have predicted, given my usual preferences.

[Edit] Okay, it's done. Must find somebody to give it the once-over to make sure I haven't committed any anatomical impossibilities or grammatical outrages.

So I arrive home in sunny, warm California, collapse on the couch with the dogs, and find that my welcome home present is a pervy Core Four fic from secondalto!

part one
part two
part three

So in the previous entry I said my favorite pervy ship is the Core Four. It seems, however, that there's very little Core Four smutfic to be had. I know of two:

Let us never speak of this again by Trekker
Whiskey Worse by Alex Wort

Wouldn't it be nice if there were more stories in this category?

Tell you what. I'll do my best to provide one if you (yes, I'm looking at you, dear reader; no squirming and pretending I don't know who you are) try to write one too.

The parameters:
Core Four (Buffy, Giles, Willow, Xander)
nobody else
any rating (but smut is nice)
try for a happy ending (but if you can't, I understand)