Zero Signal - Deleted Scenes

Title: Zero Signal (Deleted Scenes)
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Original Publication: NA

Zero Signal is my second published work. It's not connected to any of my other fics beyond setting, so there's no shared story or characters or the like. However, like Grand Theft Agro it also ran well over the initial wordcount. Whole most of what was dropped amounted to parts of scenes, individual paragraphs or even single sentences, there was one entire scene that was dropped. Needless to say, what remained also (justifiably too!) had the hell edited out of it.

The one complete scene was a bit of a pacing stumper; it didn't add much to the story and actually broke up the overall flow. While it did do it's intended job, showing the problems caused by the collapse of the HPG network, it also dragged the fic towards the end. The result was that it was dropped and the text around it edited out.

The deleted scenes are available here. The full, published story is available on Battlecorps. You should go read it. Now.

Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Ascendance Road

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Ascendance Road
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: September 2010, Classic Battletech Forums

A quick one-shot fic, Ascendance Road was created to help introduce and develop some of the characters featured in the Mimetic Badarses series. While both Elezha Karoly and Lynne Street James had already been introduced, the idea of helping develop them was just too fun to pass up. Besides, a freaky-arse cyborg and a redneck mechanic would make for a hillarious "odd couple" setup, right?

Thought so.

This fic is more of a side-story to the main Mimetic Badarses series, being largely unrelated to the main plot. Still, it's there, its fun and it adds to the characters. Enjoy.

Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - They Say

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - They Say
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: July 2010, Classic Battletech Forums

A random bout of inspiration saw me throw together an idea for an entirely new fic series. And by that, I mean that I thought of how I'd end it and the first chapter, and then figured that I'd come up with the rest along the way. Having stolen a good chunk of prose from an older (unused) fic of mine, I then went to work reconstructing it from the ground up and building the hooks for an entire series around it. The end result was surprisingly popular and spawned a series that I am continuing to sporadically work on.

And, since it's me, there's lots of character introduction. I'm terrible like that, but at least I front-load it.

Genesisbunnies - the Short without Shorts

Title: The Short without Shorts
Series: Zoids
Original Publication: July 2009, Livejournal

So three years after my last Zoid Fic, I wrote another one. I had a joke and decided to base an entire short around it. This was the result.

Continuity-wise I suppose it comes after the end of Genesisbunnies chapter 2, for what that's worth.

Genesisbunnies

Title: Genesisbunnies
Series: Zoids Genesis
Original Publication: May 2006, Phenotype's Zoids Forum

My last Zoids fanfic, Genesisbunnies was planned to be a long-running satirical story arc akin to my other Zoids Fics. Unfortunately, instead, it wound up only being two chapters long. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most important was simple. At the time, the North American Zoids fandom was dying. There had been no new Western Zoids releases in years, no new English-language media after the abortive end of Fuzors, and the Japanese Genesis toy line was busy bombing big-time, and the show stunk. That had the net result of making a fandom parody rather redundant; after all, it's hard to make fun of a fandom when it no longer exists.

With that being said, I'm rather fond of the two chapters completed, and I personally feel that they're some of my best Zoids work. And even if it's glaringly incomplete, there's still elements of what's to come.

Silent Partners

Title: Silent Partners
Series: See Below
Originally Published: October 2011, Deviantart

A simple, short one-shot fic that I wrote on a whim. I can't really say much more beyond that beyond that, since it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I'm not going to say what series it is; rather the goal is to guess before you get to the end.

Probably can, though.

Fic Repair Work

Before I wrote terrible Battletech fic, I wrote terrible Zoids fic, published under the name “Deadborder”. In a franchise largely targeted towards easily excitable twelve-year-olds, I had this odd preference for writing big, meaty epics (or at least, trying to). Largely, these were my first “big” fics, and got me the experience that I then used to carry forth into the Battletech fic and, eventually publication. So maybe they were good for something. They also got up a small following, even if a chunk of that following was made up of a single stalker using many sockpuoppets. (No, really)

My long-term goal is to re-publish them here, however, before I do that, there are a few obstacles that need to be overcome. Since each fic is in a different state, I’ll address each separately.

Salting the Earth

Title: Salting the Earth
Series: Battletech/MechWarrior
Original Publication: May 2011, Classic Battletech Forums

The last in the Grand Theft Agro series, Salting the Earth is also the biggest of them. It's the accumulation of storylines and plot threads and concepts and ideas that had been coming together for some time. It was also a bit of a "bounce back" after the darker tones of Stacking the Deck, in not having a "villain-centric" piece. And yes, as allways, there's character introductions. I'm addicted to them or something.

Otherwise, it's full of everything else you expect from the series: Schemes, plots, personal agendas, betrayals, double-crosses, badly written romance, bacon, cars, giant robots blowing things up and so forth. There's a few experimental scenes which I'm not sure how well they worked out, as well as a deliberate attempt at non-linear storytelling.

Also, see if you can guess the fic's big reveal before you get to it. I dare you.

Stacking the Deck

Title: Stacking the Deck
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Original Publication: March 2011, Classic Battletech Forums

The fourth in the Grand Theft Agro series, Stacking the Deck was a bit of a departure in theme and tone from the previous ones. This one is more 'villainous' in nature, being done mostly from the perspective of Bannsons' Raiders, a charming group of individuals at the best of times. The main point to the fic was to explore a faction that was otherwise under-represented in the Fiction (and probably never will get much else) while trying to figure how an organisation made of mass-murdering serial puppy kickers would actually work.

While as allways there's a swarm of new character introductions, most of them are guest stars. Phew!

Take On Me

Title: Take On Me
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Original Publication: February 2011, Classic Battletech Forums

After A Brighter Future and a Better Life, I was on a roll. And a big part of that roll was an eagerness to do even more. ABFaaBL was written with the idea of "maybe I could make a series out of this", featuring a lot of potential ideas that could be re-used or explored further, not the least of which was the enigmatic TF Allen. The result was Take On Me, which was deliberately written to be a "next in series" rather then an entirely stand-alone fic.

The biggest advantage was the groundwork done in Brighter Future; I no longer needed to introduce swarms of characters for the long-term, and could instead focus on those that were guest stars for the chapter. And in many of these cases, they would return further down the road. The character you introduce today is one that can make many guest spots tomorrow!

A Brighter Future and a Better Life

Title: A Brighter Future and a Better Life
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Original Publication: January 2011, Classic Battletech Forums

Grand Theft Agro was a lot of fun and opened up a bucket of new ideas for me that I decided to run with. It was letting me explore a time period that I was very interested in that was otherwise under-utilized in fanfic, as well as a faction that I had a growing appreciation of. So I decided that rather then just being a one-shot, I'd turn this into a huge-arse series of ever-increasingly long stories with a rough over-arcing storyline.

The first of these, A Brighter Future and a Better Life, served as an introduction of sorts; Grand Theft Agro was more of the prelude or something. The end result is that it is big and has oodles of characters, most of which will barely be seen again.

Grand Theft Agro - Deleted Scenes

Title: Grand Theft Agro (Deleted Scenes)
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Original Publication: NA

Grand Theft Agro holds a special place for me as it was my first published work. Yay. However, before that happened, it also needed to have the ever-living crap edited out of it. The end result was that two entire scenes hit the cutting room floor, trimming about a third off of the story before it was done. It was necessary and, more to the point, it didn't hurt the story to do such.

However, at the same time, I also felt that they were too good to waste, especially given that they feature a character who, while largely absent from the published version of the story was still important for what I had planned. Likewise, they give a lot more background and motivation for the protagonist.

The deleted scenes are available here. The full, published story is available on Battlecorps. You should go read it. Now.

My name is Rick, I write Fanfic

When I'm not doing other stuff, I like to pretend that I'm a writer. The end result is that I produce copious mountains of fanfiction under various handles (Deadborder, Rick R., deadborderbob and more then a few others) for little or no real reason other then the simple fun of writing it. And over... a long... long period of time, I've written quite a lot of it and posted it on various forums, archives, newsgroups and other such repositories. Along the way, I've also accumulated a lot of conflicting revisions, a lot of lost-but-recovered material, a few fans and one deranged stalker. (It happens)

I also became a published author, albeit by the broadest definitions of the term. It proves that persistence pays off, or something.

This blog is me attempting to collect my fiction into one place. Not only does it mean less hard-scrabbling through assorted archives, but it also gives me a chance to collect, collate, compile, revise, repair, patch conflicting versions, fix messes and clean up crap. It also means that I can stop pecking around archives to find things that I've otherwise lost as I'll now, theoretically, know exactly where they are.