Ryan M. Patrick

In part 1, I did a postmortem of what I did wrong with the second draft of Crush Depth.

In part 2, I took my new one-sentence plan for the novel and expanded it to three acts.

And this is part 3, where I will expand that outline further into chapter-by-chapter descriptions that will serve as the backbone for drafting the novel.

I talked about this process here in a previous blog post, but I’m going to go even more in depth in this one and really show you my process and thinking.

A quick note – my chapters average about to about 2,000 words. This has held true for all of my books, published or unpublished, since my first novel The Martian Incident. This is incredibly helpful from a planning standpoint for obvious reasons. Some of my chapters are a little shorter, some are a little longer, but in general they come out to 2,000 words. I can take my # of chapters including any prologues or epilogues and multiply by 2,000 to get a target word count.

And it works in reverse too. In this case, I want to target 90,000 words – roughly the same length as The Martian Incident, what I edited Lag Delay down to (it was originally closer to 110,000 words), and the upcoming The Saturn Anomaly. Doing some simple math, that comes out to 45 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue which I’ll use as margin.

I want the prologue to be roughly the same, just with a quantum processing unit for a SIGINT system rather than the active SIGINT system that the first two drafts had. I also want to have an American submarine trailing them – this will be important later. I’ve shied away from prologues in a lot of my novels but I had one in Lag Delay so I’ll do one here too in its sequel.

Pretty simple, and I’ll modify the existing one to get here.

I’m opening in a similar way to the last draft as well. The main character, Grace Parkowski, will fly to the USS Delbert D. Black via helicopter while I fill in the reader on how she got here. The difference will be when she leaves – instead of going to the USS Arizona Virginia-class submarine, Grace will go to an oil rig off the coast of Puerto Rico and down an elevator to the habitat on the sea floor below.

Like in Sphere, there will be some more discussion in the habitat once she gets down there, and I’ll do a lot of foreshadowing and giving the reader a lot of technical detail. From there, we’ll put Grace on one of the habitat’s two submersibles and leave to go search a grid for parts of the sunken Russian sub.

This is one of the biggest changes from the last couple of versions of Crush Depth – showing the mosasaurs early. This is from both internal and external feedback. I want to make sure the reader knows that there’s a speculative aspect to this early. I also want to use the Bermuda Triangle as a backdrop. It’s set there, may as well use it! Also note the English lettering – that’ll be the first big twist in a bit. This is also roughly the end of the first act.

This is pretty standard Act 2 stuff, very similar to Lag Delay (called out in the Chapter 14 description) and most of the Preston & Child and Michael Crichton novels that this is based on. Some small try/fail cycles and exploration of technology. The only concern here is that after the mosasaur’s appearance there isn’t much in terms of raising the stakes. I’ll have to make sure I mention that we’ve got a ticking clock here – both the Russian fleet’s arrival as well as the hurricane coming toward them.

Again, pretty self-explanatory raising the stakes with a second appearance of the mosasaurs. I’m reusing a lot of things from the last draft too. A lot of the internal conflict on the habitat I’m going to ad-lib as I go – maybe some Navy vs DARPA stuff.

This is where “shit hits the fan” – it’ll be similar to the giant squid attack in Sphere at roughly the midpoint of the novel. If I expand any chapter into multiple ones, it’ll be here.

Second attack. Lots of reveals here, especially that the US government knows about the mosasaurs. However, I’m not going to reveal – at least not yet – that they’re sentient. Here will be more similar to Deep Storm. Chapters 26-28 will be a bit of a breather from 24-25, then they attack again in 29. Again, 30 may be multiple chapters – I’ll know more when I get to it.

We’ll take more casualties here – I’m probably going to kill more characters here than in any of my other books. And here I’m going to get to the climax – the mosasaurs vs Grace.

Here Parkowski really shines – she’s an engineer, she’ll use her skills to solve the problem. This is the climax.

The dénouement. Seems a bit long, but I can deal with it. These chapters may be a bit shorter.

Same as the last 2 drafts.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t set in stone, but the big plot points most definitely are. I’m going to start on this next week and the plan is to write 3 chapters (6000 words)/week. The plan is to have the next (3rd) draft done by the end of January 2026.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps someone! I’m going to keep doing these regardless – they’re helpful for me. Next one will be next week with a report on how the prologue and Chapters 1-2 are doing.