Ryan M. Patrick

May is going to be a big month for me. I’m starting my new job and hopefully getting back on track in terms of reading and writing.

For reading, here’s what I want to finish this month:

• Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds
• Keraban the Inflexible by Jules Verne
• Zuri’s War by Nick Snape
• Command and Control by Marc Cameron
• The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks
• Act of Defiance by Brian Andrews
• Extinction by Douglas Preston

It’s a lot, but I also have already started the first two. We’ll see how I’m able to do.

For writing, I want to finish Trials. I am so close to being finished, just a couple of set pieces – maybe 15,000 words – and I can do a final pass and send it off to my betas. It’ll be good to get that off my plate so I can tackle Crush Depth with all of my attention while beta feedback on Trials comes in.

For anyone wondering, here’s what my next few years look like:

Lag Delay is out in the wild, and not selling quite as well as I would have liked, but I also haven’t had the time for a proper social media or advertising campaign. Trials is almost done, and I think I’ll be able to publish by the end of the year – just need to get through the DOD prepublication process, then I’ll have a decent release date. Crush Depth‘s second half is done, just need to write a satisfying first half that sets up all of the plot points without boring the reader to death.

Journey is going to be the sequel to Trials, a short, 60,000 word book that’s the middle part of the trilogy – not expecting that to take me more than a few months to draft. The Europan Deception, my one golden idea…we’ll see how that pans out, but I’m going to finally finish it and move on. Hero is the final book in The Mystios Chronicles, and then Sensor Overload is the 3rd Grace Parkowski book, set amidst a possible Second Korean War in the near-future with UFOs and UAPs ratcheting up the tension. It’s outlined, but it needs to be modified a bit.

After that, the plan is one “short” book (like Trials) and one “long” one (like Lag Delay) out per year. I’ll go into my sales numbers for full transparency in a future post, but everything I’ve seen so far matches up with what 6 Figure Authors has told me – it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and everything snowballs into greater success.

Thanks and I hope you have a great May!