Ryan M. Patrick

If you read my update from earlier in the month, you know I shelved Crush Depth.

It was a hard decision.

It’s a 2nd draft and a story idea that I’ve spent a lot of time writing and editing since 2020. And if giving up on the manuscript last time was hard, this one was even harder. I had sent it out to a few beta readers and gotten really good feedback on it. And I’m slowly but surely building up my reader base and had a few people on Twitter and Instagram ask when it was coming out.

But it’s not the book I wanted to write. For a number of reasons, some of which I touched in the last blog post, but most importantly it doesn’t start or end at the right place.

In other words, I’m not following the writing advice I often give to other writers – in late, out early. Especially the first part of the phrase.

I think I heard the term first on Brandon Sanderson’s podcast Writing Excuses. It’s not a hard rule – it can be broken – but in general, you want to start a story as late as possible and leave it as soon as it makes sense.

Below is a brief outline of the last version of Crush Depth (the one I shelved):

The last version (in 2021) had another huge block between the first two, which I cut in the newer draft. It took way long too for the main character to get onboard the USS Arizona and underwater deep below the depths of the Atlantic. I knew I had a problem in terms of pacing but I thought I could fix it by cutting a piece of the story.

However, this still leaves a lot of plot that not only am I not really equipped to write about – I don’t get submarines like I do aircraft or space – it’s also less interesting to the average reader. It also touches on another item that I touched on in the last update. Readers who want a military adventure novel will be disappointed by the lack of military action while readers who want a Preston & Child-style science/tech thriller won’t like all of the military aspects.

How do I fix this? Go back to basics – get in even later than I had before!

I noodled a bit on this last weekend. I need to do two things – cut a lot of the military pieces while focusing on the things that readers will find interesting. So, I’m going to start the novel after the Russian submarine has already been found. Basically two-thirds of the plot of the last version of Crush Depth will have already happened!

On top of that, I’m going to move the setting from the USS Arizona (which, spoiler alert, will still appear in the novel) to an undersea habitat similar to the novels I’ve used for inspiration – Sphere and Deep Storm. This will allow me to focus less on being technically accurate as to how a nuclear fast-attack boat operates and certain military aspects to really digging into the technology and science and, of course, the mysterious mosasaurs that keep attacking American and Russian submarines. There will still be a military presence on the habitat but that’ll be more of a secondary antagonist than part of the primary setting.

I’m also cutting a lot of the subplots, including the Russian deep-cover infiltrator and the main character’s husband’s search for a missing UUV, and going back to a single POV like in Lag Delay. Again, I’m driving focus, and keeping the plot centered around the mosasaurs without a lot of the noise in the current version.

Will this work? Who knows, but I am going to document my journey reworking this novel here on my blog. I think large parts of it – the initial flight to the USS Delbert D. Black and the final confrontation with the mosasaurs – will remain, but much of the rest of the book will be different. I also have a great idea for a first-act twist that’ll really throw things for a loop.

Keep a look out for the first blog post on this later this month, with me showing how I go from a one-or-two sentence plot idea to a three-act outline.

Crush Depth isn’t dead yet!