Feather vs. Mountain/Rise and Shine commentary

[DeJaVu]

With the publication of these two stories I have finally debuted as a new writer on BattleCorps. It sure is a great feeling to see one's own work published on BattleCorps for the first time!
Submitting my own ideas was a major reason for joining BattleCorps in the first place.

Feather versus Mountain was not the first BC submission project I began working on (actually the seventh, I think) but it was the first one to be ready for submission. Following some helpful advice from Jason I ultimately split it in two: Rise and Shine was originally simply the second half of the (single) story submission, with only the haiku placed at the very end.

I really enjoyed writing this story. That it was accepted is quite encouraging with regards to all those other story projects I'm working on simultaneously at this time. Although I found out that I'm a much slower writer than I thought. Oh, and a big Thank You to the helpful people at the Writer’s Workshop is definitely in order!
Perhaps it can serve as an encouragement to YOU to try writing for BattleCorps, too.
Hope you like it.


*******SPOILER ALERT!*******
Do not read on unless you have already read the stories!


Conceiving the story

Weird as that may sound, this first story submission was sort of testing the waters for me with a story that I hadn’t grown attached to. The first one I began (and it’s still far from finished!) is going to be more a novella than short story judging by the writing process so far, and I really want it to succeed. So I started other projects to hone my writing skills first and fire a few “test shots” at Jason with short stories of 5000 words or less.

The idea behind "Feather versus Mountain" evolved out of an apocryphal BattleTechnology SecurityMech, the 15-ton GRD-1N Guardian from BattleTechnology #13. It says in BattleTechnology #13 that the Ryuken deployed a company of Guardians on An Ting against the Dragoons, but fared poorly, running afoul of infantry ambushes. Only one Guardian remained operational.

The story fell into place quicker than any other in my head when I read the Guardian's fluff. I could vividly imagine the desperate Ryuken throwing SecurityMechs against the Dragoon onslaught.
How would they have deployed ultra-light ’Mechs?

And then there was the character of “Gibbs” from the Wolves on the Border novel. When I first read its fluff in TRO3025 back in 1992, I thought the Ostscout was an intriguing ’Mech and Gibbs was the first Ostscout pilot ever mentioned in fiction. I was disappointed that he was never mentioned again after the book’s prologue (even though Dragoon pilot Gatlin gets a few lines later on). Anyways, Gibbs somehow remained in the back of my mind all these years and I always wondered “Whatever happened to” him. His first name is never mentioned anywhere, so I made it up as “Willard”.

Initial drafts had Gibbs pilot a Guardian, but since it is not canonical design, Continuity would not even accept it as an unnamed ’Mech. Luckily I could switch it out for the Guard (canonical through an offhand mentioning in TRO:VA in the Copper entry, although no complete stats exist as of yet) which is a quad 15-ton SecurityMech. The story remains compatible with Guardian’s fluff: As a nod to all other BattleTechnology fans out there I’ll leave it up to you to decide what kind of machine-gun toting 15-tonners “Guardian Company” is composed of. Nowhere does it say that they are Guards like Gibbs’ ’Mech…


Writing the story

I meticulously analyzed the information from Wolves on the Border to get all the details right – my story essentially retells what happened just prior to Fraser killing Akuma. Robert Charette’s is an immensely big pair of boots to walk in, and honestly I don’t think I even properly tried.

I took great care to make sure that all important named characters in my story die (Akuma, Chou, Gibbs, West; Dechan Fraser is a special case of course) or were invented by me (Takeo, Miura – although I suppose they ultimately didn’t survive either). The first draft actually narrated the second part from Fraser’s viewpoint, but that was quickly switched to West. Wouldn’t want to hijack one of Charette’s most important and running characters.
Generally I took throwaway characters that weren't really fleshed out. Akuma is an exception; he is pivotal to the story and I had to study his language and demeanor throughout the book. I must say I'm fairly proud of the outcome, he remains a haughty Kurita-style SoB in the dialogue scene.

Writing this story was also a good opportunity to give some screen time to the often overlooked ugly kids of BattleTech – a Charger is shown as an actually dangerous opponent here, and the melting pot that is the Ryuken-ichi got stuff like a Rifleman and Quickdraw otherwise, with an UrbanMech being mentioned. All of these are supposedly common designs in the DC, but rarely appear in fiction because they suck as gameboard pieces.

I also took the liberty to retro-explain the two “small ’Mechs” that were destroyed when the field HQ exploded in the novel as SecurityMechs from Guardian Company.

I can't stress enough how important and helpful the people over at the Writer's Workshop were for me, especially trboturtle, five_corparty and wolfhound88.
People, if you aspire to write for BT, go to the workshop first to check if your submissions are up to par. I re-wrote the story twice before putting it up on the Writer's Workshop, then had three reworks with the feedback from there until I finally submitted it to the BC editor properly.


Cut parts

It’s amazing how much material was cut from the story again because I felt it was distracting. Details are important to me, but somebody on the Writer’s Workshop list pointed out to me that I wasn’t supposed to write a sourcebook… so here’s some “apocryphal” stuff that didn’t make it into the final cut (none of this was even in the BC submission emailed off to Jason):

- Gibbs’ family background – being dispossessed played havoc on his marriage, and although both their daughters are on some MechWarrior college they have little hope of ever being assigned a ’Mech if their father is dispossessed. Another reason for Gibbs to try dying as a MechWarrior: It would push his daughters way up in the waiting list for ’Mech allocation. (Not sure if this stuff would even have passed the Continuity Police though.)

- Akuma wondered if maybe Gibbs had developed an alcohol problem. There was certainly reason to wonder.

- What happened on Dromini was that Akuma later convinced Gibbs and others from the company to return and try to get that Archer after all, without Tetsuhara knowing or approving. But by that time the Dragoons had already moved to protect Jaime and Gibbs’ Ostscout was hunted down as a top priority because it was the fastest and could track the Dragoons. The Wasp LAM from Jaime Wolf’s command lance was sent headhunting, and succeeded largely because of Akuma’s inept gung-ho leadership in the botched mission. Not that Gibbs ever dared raise accusations against Akuma over that, of course. (This was an early flashback scene, later a point in the Akuma/Gibbs dialogue and finally cut altogether as irrelevant. From how the story evolved, I don’t even think anymore that this is exactly what happened. It somehow doesn’t fit.)

- In an earlier story draft, the convoy was evacuating the police barracks with all their supplies and ammo and came under attack almost immediately, incurring first losses on the unbloodied SecurityMech pilots. This extra battle scene somehow hampered the flow of the story. The convoy became a McGuffin for Gibbs’ final part, and dies off-screen along with Guardian Company.

- There was a subplot involving CGC pilot Hansen, who was almost like a son to Gibbs. In what bordered on comic relief, his SecurityMech is frequently put out of action early on, misses all dangerous encounters because it is always being repaired at the time, and ultimately is the only one to survive because the Techs cannibalize it for spare parts (instead of sending it to battle). A bit of that latter aspect is still found in the published story, in the notion about one SecurityMech being out of commission because its gyro was extricated for an UrbanMech. Originally, it was said to be the fusion engine, establishing that the “unnamed” 15-tonners had a grade 60 engine like the UrbanMech which in turn was one of many hints towards the apocryphal Guardian. Others were “armor allocated just like a Wasp”, “five machine guns” and looking “like a crossover between an Ostscout and a Locust”. These references were all cut from the published version.

- Gibbs had actually assumed command over the defenders at Harmony Park by virtue of his rank, and organized them with some degree of skill. Tthat’s why they were fairly effective against Fraser’s unit, unlike the other Ryuken who are usually depicted as incompetent.

- Speaking of Harmony Park, I toyed with the idea of expressly making it a cemetery but decided to leave this open.

- In the novel, two people named Ellings and Alcorn are mentioned besides West as people Fraser lost on his way to Central Square. They seem to have been killed, as their names aren’t mentioned in the Wolf’s Dragoons sourcebook. West’s viewpoint is given in the story, and also how Dominguez’s Wolverine got mauled so badly (this is later mentioned in the novel). I didn’t want to pack yet more distracting information, so cut out all references to Ellings, Alcorn and the Panthers that are implied to have finished them off in the novel.
For what it’s worth, in my early drafts Ellings and Alcorn were the COs of the tank and hovertank units in Fraser’s ad-hoc unit, not MechWarriors.