Ryan M. Patrick

Day job has been keeping me swamped. I’ve had very little time to write this month.

First, the bad news. Lag Delay has not been doing well on the querying front. I believe that the first third to half of the book needs to be completely rewritten in order to capture the modern reader. This is a long-term effort and I’m going to likely have to shelve the project for the time being. I believe that the current version is a complete and satisfying novel, but it could be better. I don’t want to publish anything less than my best work for that novel.

Then, the good news, and there’s a lot of it.

The Martian Incident is at the Pentagon and I’ve had some “trusted agents” read over it. I believe it will be good to go to be self-published as soon as I get it back from the five-sided building.

Crush Depth is just flowing right now. I’m on just under 50,000 words out of a planned 120,000 and it is nicely coming into place. The outline I came up with years ago is holding up well and all of my modifications to it have been small, mostly to help with character development. There’s still a ton of editing to be done once I finish to make all of the pieces line up (I’ve never done this many subplots!) but I’m feeling really confident about it. I’ve come up with some AI-developed mockups for covers, one posted here, but I’ll either pay for a cover or develop one myself. The big question for me is if it’s a good place to start the Parkowski series, or if I need to fix Lag Delay first. Likely a 2024 problem.

Even better, I’ve done a bit of a re-organization on my other sci-fi series, which is now called The Rigel Conspiracy, which was the original name for the first book, now titled Prolegomenon. That book had two 10,000-20,000 word false starts that I was able to salvage quite a bit of and am now at 24,000 words out of a planned 75,000. I’m slightly below my planned word count, I should be at 26,000 based on the outline, but it’s flowing well and I’ve gotten good feedback on the initial chapter. I’m hoping to get it done this summer and send it to the Pentagon and to alpha/beta readers in parallel, then publish it as soon as I get the OK. It’s going to be a short, fast novel, but it’s fun to write, and I’m convinced it’ll be fun to read. My focus will be on this and Crush Depth and leave Lag Delay to be solved at a future time. I think this pivot will be best in the long run.

The Europan Deception is slowly being edited. I think I know what to do for the third act, but we’ll see what the most recent (and hopefully last) round of beta readers think.

June should be a good month, we’ll see how productive I can be!