Ryan M. Patrick

2025 is going to be a big year for me. If everything holds, it’ll be the year I release The Europan Deception, my white whale – the book I’ve always wanted to write and that’s kept me going as I’ve improve my craft. I’ve got a lot of other things I’m working on too. I didn’t do this last year, but given that I do end of month/beginning of month posts I’ll link back to this one to track progress.

The Europan Deception

This is it – it’s finally going to happen. It’s been a long time coming but I finally have The Europan Deception down from a developmental standpoint and am going through beta feedback. In 2025, I’d like to:

• Edit The Europan Deception
• Send The Europan Deception to the Pentagon
• Purchase a cover for The Europan Deception
• Proofread The Europan Deception
• Develop a pre-launch campaign for The Europan Deception
• Release The Europan Deception

Given that I don’t know how long the pre-publication security review process will take, I can’t really put dates on any of these, but I do plan on having an edited version to the Pentagon by February 28.

Crush Depth

I’ll be finishing up the standalone sequel to Lag Delay sometime early in 2025 – it currently sits at 50,000 words out of a planned 95,000-100,000. If I didn’t have to do a security review, it could be a 2025 release as well. But, given the subject matter – nuclear submarines and Wunderwaffe and all kinds of intelligence community shenanigans – I think it’ll be early 2026 by the time I get Crush Depth out to the public. Regardless, next year I plan to:

• Draft Crush Depth
• Get feedback on Crush Depth from my beta readers
• Edit Crush Depth
• Send Crush Depth to the Pentagon

Journey

I wrote Trials, the first book in my science fantasy series The Mystios Chronicles earlier this year, but I’ve kind of set it aside for now – I want to write all 3 books before I edit them together. After I finish Crush Depth, I plan on knocking out the 2nd book, Journey. It’s outlined, I just need to knock out the 60,000 words or so and then let it sit until Hero – Book 3 – is done.

• Draft Journey

Memento Vivere

This one I haven’t talked much about, either on Twitter or Instagram or here, but it’s a contemporary fantasy I’m working on that’s heavily inspired by my favorite active fantasy author – Tim Powers – set in the area I grew up in in Southeast Pennsylvania. It was unnamed up until last week where I came up with a title – Memento Vivere, the opposite of Memento Mori (“remember you must die”) that means “remember you must live” or “remember life”. I’m currently outlining it and will be done by the end of 2024 – it’s my only goal still outstanding. I’m shooting for about 90,000 words in this one. Not sure what I’ll do with it after but I want to get it out of my system.

• Draft Memento Vivere

Outlining

There’s 3 books I want to outline in 2025. First is The Apophis Contingency, the sequel to The Europan Deception. I have an outline but it’s single-POV and needs a lot of fine-tuning. Next is Sensor Overload – the sequel to Crush Depth. Same thing, is single-POV, need to make it multi-POV to match what I did in the previous book. The last one is the aforementioned Hero to finish The Mystios Chronicles.

• Outline The Apophis Contingency
• Outline Sensor Overload
• Outline Hero

Short Stories

I knocked out 4 shorts last year, 0 have been published (so far). Going to try for 4 more in 2025 and hopefully get one or more of my 2024 or 2025 shorts published in a mag.

• Quantum Computer short drafted
• City on the Hill short drafted
• The Last Signal short drafted
• Sirens short drafted

I’ll be referring back to this post a bunch. It’s a very aggressive schedule – draft basically two and a half books (granted, one of them is 60,000 words, but still), edit two books, and draft 4 shorts while doing all of my day-to-day writing stuff AND my day job and family commitments. February 2025 is probably the first time I’ll have a good check on how I’m doing. By the end of that month, I should have 2-3 of my 19 goals done…if I don’t, might need to readjust.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see how I’m able to do! Still working on a couple more posts for this month, one on the Space Force and another on my first year of sales, so this is a bit of a bonus one for the month.