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.