Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Nothing but a Hound Dog

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Nothing but a Hound Dog
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: November 2012, Classic Battletech Forums

One of my objectives in my fic writing series was to tie everything together to a degree. The concept was to have two series running in parallel with a third that would follow on to them, but all being interconnected. However, that fell apart very quickly as I got distracted, ran out of ideas and moved on to other things.

Nothing but a Hound Dog was based around some of those earlier concepts. Characters featured in this fic made their actual debuts in You are saying Impudence to me (Yet to be republished) with a backstory that was alluded to but not actually described. A part of this fic is dedicated to expanding upon that, filling out details and also better explaining characters and their motivations.

The other main goal of this fic is to expand upon the Bad Guys in two ways. The first being to bring more life to the Word of Blake force that had become the adversaries to our heroes. The second is to introduce the titular Hounds, a collection of Mercenary units working for the Word.

Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Haven

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Haven

Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: March 2012, Classic Battletech Forums

Originally I had planned to alternate between Mimetic Badarses and Grand Theft Agro fics. However, that plan fell apart as I became more and more focused on the latter, resulting in a year-long gap between fics. It was particualrily galling as Haven here was conceived in 2010, but would go nearly two years before actually seeing the light of day.

A direct follow-on to Hotel California, the two fics began life as merely parts of the same story. However, as they both ballooned, they were split off, resulting in the substantial gap. The main point of Haven then became to end the story arc that starts with Stormfront, and begin the next one.

Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Hotel California

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Hotel California
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: December 2010, Classic Battletech Forums

A direct follow-on to Stormfront, Hotel California continues the Mimetic Badarses storyline. It's the end of the first major arc, but by no means the end of the series. More to the point, the story served as an introduction to the major villain of the series, one who's existence had been confined to a few hints and a short appearance thus far.

This chapter was originally going to be the first half of a story; instead, due to a ballooning wordcount, it ended up being entirely standalone. This happens to me a lot.

Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Stormfront

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Stormfront
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: October 2010, Classic Battletech Forums

After the side-story of Ascendence Road, the next chapter, Stormfront, returned to the main Mimetic Badarses storyline. Continuing the plot elements initially raised in They Say, this chapter introduces a number of important elements of the overall main story line. It also greatly expands the cast (in a fic that I wrote? Amazing!) with a lot of new concepts that will be important in events to come.

A chunk of this fic was planned well in advance, and parts of it were written before Ascendance Road. Initially, I started with the last scene and worked backwards from there. I'd even planned to open with a portion of that and do some sort of non-linear storytelling but... it sucks.

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.