Ryan M. Patrick

I was going to write a post this month on something else, but I was at my brother’s wedding out in Texas and my mom gave me some printouts of my old stories. It made me incredibly nostalgic, and really put how far I’ve come into perspective. I started when I was maybe 9 or 10, and now I’m 33, and it’s been a long road to get to where I am.

My writing can be separated into three eras (yes, I have four Taylor Swift-loving daughters!) – pre-USAFA, post-USAFA, and my “modern” one.

Pre-USAFA (1999-2008)

I always wanted to be a writer.

I was an early reader, going from picture books when I was maybe 2 to my mom’s Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books in kindergarten. I definitely preferred mysteries and thrillers, or at least books with those aspects. And I always had the dream that I’d create stories like those, with twists and turns to make the reader feel the same way I did when I read those books.

With writing though, I didn’t start with the fanfiction route like a lot of my contemporaries. Instead, I started with Legos of all things, coming up with outlandish scenarios – most of which, big surprise, were science-fiction in nature. When I got a Vtech kid’s laptop when I was in third grade, I started putting some of those down in the word processing application on it. Sadly, I don’t think I ever recovered any of those, but they did teach me the process – and just how hard it is!

In fourth grade, I had to write a short story for class, and – to no one’s surprise who read my outlining post – I wrote one about adventurers seeking lost pirate gold on Cocos Island in the Pacific Ocean. Obviously inspired by Clive Cussler and some “lost treasures of history” books I had been reading, it ended with a twist – something else that’s stuck with me through the years

I didn’t write much else outside of school until I got to high school and finally had a PC in my room. At night, after I got my homework done, I used to sit around on AOL Instant Messenger (remember that?) and write. These were mostly modern thrillers.

I originally had the very-YA plot of a high schooler who lost his girlfriend in a terrorist bombing, grew up to become a CIA officer, and the leader of a terrorist faction was his old girlfriend…who obviously hadn’t been killed in the explosion, but rather rescued and brainwashed by the terrorists. I might come back to this plot at a future point, it’s very Ludlum-esque and full of drama, but I dropped it sometime in 2005-2006 after never getting past the first few chapters.

The next book that I worked on was a conspiracy thriller which will be very familiar to those of you who have listened to me talk on Twitter about The Europan Deception. A lone government agent is cut off from his support network after being accused of a crime that he did not commit and is forced to chase down an Illuminati plot to take over the world, set up millennia ago by the survivors of Atlantis. This one I actually finished, and I have an old Word doc of, but it’s terrible and will never see the light of day. The first page, though, is ok I guess.

After I finished it, I realized that it would work better in a sci-fi setting. I am a huge fan of Babylon 5 and Stargate SG-1 and figured I could use the ancient-future conspiracies in both to enhance the plot, not realizing that really it just needed stronger, deeper characters. I started, and got maybe 30,000 words into it but stopped when I left on June 25, 2008 to go inprocess at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. My writing career would be on hold.

Post-USAFA (2012-2020)

I didn’t write at all while I was at the Air Force Academy. To be honest, I didn’t have enough time – one of the few times that is actually a valid argument! I had anywhere between 18 and 23 credit-hours a semester and in one of the hardest majors available – astronautical engineering. On top of that, I was also dating (and later became engaged to) my now-wife. Writing was the last thing on my mind.

When I graduated, I moved out to Dayton, Ohio, where I was assigned to Wright-Patterson AFB. There, I was assigned to a unit – Simulators Division of the AF Life Cycle Management Center – where most of my coworkers were civilians making much more money than little O-1 me, and went out to lunch every single day. I was saving up money to pay for my wedding…so I did not. Left alone in Building 32 for an hour every day, I started writing again.

I got about 10,000 words into the next draft of the sci-fi conspiracy thriller, but didn’t like where it was going. It was too similar to the last one, and I kept getting stuck on the beginning – I had a four-ship of starfighters getting demolished by a giant, mysterious starship and didn’t know where to take it after that. I hadn’t yet learned how to outline.

Frustrated, I decided to try something new. Why not tell the story of the starship in a prequel story, one similar to Michael Crichton’s Sphere but with a different third act? This untitled novel will sound incredibly familiar to my readers – more in a few paragraphs – but I never got more than a few chapters into it.

I decided to go back to the original sci-fi thriller idea, and actually made it about 40-50,000 words into it, with the beginnings of an outline – the first time I had ever created one. However, that novel was put on hold by school once again as I was accepted to go full-time to the Air Force Institute of Technology to get my master’s degree.

That was much like USAFA, where I didn’t have much time to write, but after I finished my thesis I did find time to pick back up on the prequel-concept – I had about a month and a half between when I had to turn my thesis in and when we left for Albuquerque. This time, I put together a small outline – a paragraph or so for each of the five sections of the book – and then started writing it.

When I got to Albuquerque, I quickly was assigned to manage the STP-2 mission, the first DOD Falcon Heavy launch, and that involved a ton of travel. Most of you who are reading this know I’m not a big TV guy, and there’s only so much reading I can do in hotel rooms after work, so I started writing again – this time on what became The Martian Incident. It took me a couple of years, but I finally finished a novel for the first time since high school! However, I didn’t have any writing friends, no writing community, so the only person who read it was my dad – then it was shelved (more on that later).

After that, I put it in the trunk (temporarily) and started working on the next novel – the same sci-fi conspiracy thriller, now called The Balmoral Transaction. I got about 50,000 words into it, we moved from Albuquerque to D.C., and then knocked out another 50,000 words…when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

And everything changed.

Modern (2020-)

When the world went into lockdown, I kept working. I was assigned to the NRO and all of my work was in a SCIF – I couldn’t work from home like everyone else! However, after a few weeks, they started to put us on a “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that we worked every other week…and had a ton of time off to write. I kept plugging away on The Balmoral Transaction.

I also started talking with a friend of one of my USAFA roommates, a fellow writer (the first I had ever met!) who took a look at some of the stuff I had written and told me that while some of my stuff was ok, it wasn’t good. And, to be honest, that stung at first. How dare someone tell me I’m not a good writer? But then I thought about it more, and looked at it as an engineer – I didn’t have any feedback to my writing! I was a fully open-loop system, with no way to improve.

He suggested two I do two things:

1. Read the Story by Robert McKee, which would be my first “craft” book.
2. Join a local or online writing group.

It would end up being a turning point in my writing career.

Story absolutely blew my mind – I’ve written about it here as the best craft book I’ve come across. It’s primarily a screenwriting book, but how McKee is able to break down plot and character really hit home with me. I immediately realized everything that I was doing wrong with The Balmoral Transaction and temporarily shelved it – even though it was basically finished – and then started work on an outline for a Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child-inspired technothriller tentatively titled Lag Delay.

Finding a writing group proved to be a bit harder. I tried a couple of different Reddit communities but they didn’t really pan out (I’ll have a full Reddit writing post at some point!). I tried the Goodreads forums too, still not really connecting with anyone. Then, on a whim, I responded to a Reddit post and joined a Discord group that I clicked with, and then joined some more. The most important thing I learned from them was how to give feedback…and how to accept it. I quickly figured out that alpha and beta reading helped me as it much as it helped the person I was giving feedback to. I still love doing it, I just have much less time now to beta read.

I spent all of 2020 and 2021 writing & revising Lag Delay, then did a final beta round in the first half of 2022 before sending it off to the Pentagon pre-publication review office (I’ll do a post on that too at some point). On a whim, I had some trusted friends read The Martian Incident and got some feedback on that as well, then fired that one off to the Pentagon – it was better than I had thought it was!

The next book I worked on for the latter half of 2022 was The Europan Deception, the follow-on from The Balmoral Transaction based on what I had learned from Story and the two years of feedback. I thought it was good, but my beta readers were less convinced. As I looked through the feedback, I realized I had missed the mark, mostly in character and tone. I set that one aside temporarily.

In 2023 I started on Crush Depth, the sequel to Lag Delay, and while I had a lot going on – I was in the process of separating from the Space Force and finding a civilian job – I finished that, but once again set it aside. I realized after I had finished it that I had started the plot too late and it needed too much work to fix.

I also finished a sci-fi book called Enigma that year, but put it aside as well…because both The Martian Incident and Lag Delay cleared the Pentagon review and were able to be published! I set a plan to get both of them out the door in about a 4-month window in late 2023-early 2024. Lots of final edits – and requested changes from the Pentagon – needed to be made, but I got them both done and self-published. One of them did much better than the other.

In 2024, I wrote Trials, and was getting ready to work on the two sequels so that I could edit them together and rapid release them when I was approached by a couple of authors on Twitter about querying a small press. I reached out to one of their very-famous founders and we had a brief discussion, and the book of mine he was the most interested was…The Europan Deception, the same book I had put aside almost two years ago! I quickly knocked out a new draft this summer and queried it a few weeks ago; still waiting to hear back from them while I work on the next version of Crush Depth to be either queried to them or self-published.

And here I am! I have a “trunk” of five novels – The Balmoral Transaction, The Europan Deception, Crush Depth, Enigma, and Trials…and I have another dozen or so novels outlined that I hope to write, edit, and release in the next decade or so.

Thanks for reading, it’s been a long journey but the best is still yet to come.