Ryan M. Patrick

So far, I’ve:

1. Talking about what went wrong with the last draft of Crush Depth
2. Came up with a new 3-act plot
3. Outlined it chapter-by-chapter
4. Drafted the prologue and first two chapters

And now we’re going to discuss Chapters 3 through 5!

Chapter 3: Parkowski travels down an elevator on the oil rig to the habitat. The journey is like Deep Storm’s but the habitat below is like Sphere’s.

At the end of Chapter 2, Grace Parkowski, the main character, is told that she’s going down to the bottom of the ocean.

Up until now, she has no idea where she’s going to be working from, and this comes as a huge shock to her.

Quick discussion of Project Azorian – huge pet research project of mine. Then we’ll get on the bathysphere that will take Grace and Commander Carmano to the bottom of the ocean – very similar to what happens in Deep Storm, a big inspiration for this novel. Note all of the submarine fiction references – they’re all coming into play here!

I’m a big student of story structure, and this is the “point of no return” from the archplot. Once Grace goes down, she’s not coming back up!

Lots of internal reflection and external dialog.

Some references to Lag Delay and we’re at Atlantis (yes, I cannot help myself!).

Chapter 4: There, she is coldly welcomed by the crew and shown to the command center of the habitat.

It’s not going to be as “cold” as it gets later, but it’s not a warm welcome.

No obvious Sphere reference here, but readers of the novel or viewers of the movie will pick the indirect one up!

They go into the acclimation chamber and continue their conversation as their bodies adapt. And Grace instantly picks up on what’s going on.

Afterwards, we meet Hokes – he’s going to be a bit of an antagonist, but not as much as in the last draft of Crush Depth.

Quick tour of the Atlantis habitat

And then we get our first mission briefing!

Chapter 5: At the command center, Parkowski meets the rest of the senior Navy and DARPA crew. She doesn’t trust any of them. They give her the run-down of what’s been happening as well as the time constraints – the Russian Northern Fleet is steaming across the Atlantic to look for their missing sub. A submersible – one of two – is about to leave to go search a grid and Parkowski asks if she can join as a familiarization meeting.

I went off-script here – she doesn’t meet some of the senior staff, namely Captain Vasco who’s in charge of the whole operation, but I have my reasons for that.

Introducing a lot of concepts here that will be important later.

And we have our next task – go search grid B-6 for a piece of the Vepr.

But we pull it all back – Grace is a mercenary, here for a specific task. And we’ll go out hunting soon!

Again, this is a lot of setup, and it’s slower (like Lag Delay) than the last version. But I think it’s a better sequel and really captures the claustrophobic nature of being at the bottom of the sea better. Also, the reduction in subplots lets me really focus on the main mystery – what took out the Russian submarine?