A long time ago Arch started up a series called The Seige of Vraks. It was to wind up being forty-three videos long and very well received. About ten videos in, people started posting little snippets of ideas and quotes and all sorts of funny things about the siege. At first, it was observational humor, but then there were some serious stories in there. About that point, I was hooked. I had years before quit writing, mostly because of burnout. The ghostwriting scene had dried up and the work I was getting was disturbing. So I just walked away.

For some reason, reading the stories getting posted got me going again.

At first, it was just strange stuff, then some humorous stuff, but then I was inspired by the reception of Epsilon-288, the lone Kriegs Guardsman who had a run-in with A Nurgel Space Marine and for some reason, Epsilon-228 became very popular. As the series ground on, I started taking the time to put together a bunch of the stories from the comments and the result was Tales From The Trenches.

I slapped it together, posted it on a website, and forgot about it,

However, TFTT rekindled in me my love for writing, but no longer would I write for profit grinding out soft-core romance novels. This time, I would write for myself and I would write the story that I had wanted to write. A story about heroes overcoming impossible odds. Alas, I hate prequels. So, before I got to the story, I wanted to write the story about how the hero had become the hero. Then I wound up writing the story about how his friends became heroes.

In short, I wound up writing 875k words spread out over five different story arcs, and I have yet to get to the actual story I wanted to write. I have finished three books, and I'm working on four more as of this posting. I have the story worked out for a total of 27 to tell the whole thing, and I plan on finishing all of them. I have not made a single penny on any of it, posting it all for free on Scribble Hub.

I am very happy with the result.

I have relearned why I started writing in the first place.

I have Arch and the Seige of Vraks to thank for that.

So when Arch started to remaster the Seige of Vraks series, I off-handedly posted, "You know... I should remaster Tales From The Trenches." And I got a bunch of people telling me to do EXACTLY THAT. Honestly, I thought Epsilon-228 didn't make that much of an impression, but apparently, he did. As someone said, "[TFTT is] as far as I’m concerned an integral part of the Siege of Vraks series." This got me thinking.

My goal is to go back, fix a bunch of errors, clean it up, feed it through an editor, take the time to go back through the original videos and see if there were any posts I missed, then collect everything, and release it in forty-three installments. The original series was 43 videos, so I figure I should stick with that.

Unfortunately, the original TFTT really didn't start until about halfway through TSOV, so the stories will not quite match up with the videos as they are released. Alas, this is unavoidable, otherwise, there wouldn't really be any content for the first half of the series. But since we've all seen the original, I don't think that will matter much. This version might seem a bit out of sequence, but that's because, in the end, this is an Anthology. It isn't just my writing, but the writing of a whole lot of contributors.

Some of the original work isn't copied over word for word. Often I cleaned it up to make it work better in a serial format. This is all in fun, so if you are a contributor, just understand I took some artistic license for the sake of the narrative flow. If you feel I screwed your story up, feel free to post your correction in the comment section of each installment.