Ryan M. Patrick

Not going to link all of the previous 5 blog posts on the development of the third draft of Crush Depth, I’m going to put them on the book’s page and just refer back to it.

At the end of Chapter 5, the novel’s protagonist, Grace Parkowski, has just been briefed on her next task – go out with the submersible Nautilus to investigate a piece of a sunken Russian submarine to see if it has the quantum processing unit. Now, she needs to get on board and leave.

Chapter Six: She travels to the airlock and gets on the Nautilus. The submersible departs the habitat.

Time to introduce some lingo! A younger Ryan M. Patrick would have info-dumped here, but now that I’m more experienced, I do it in dialog.

Some personal experience – I’ve been inside the simulators of both (and a lot of others, pretty much everything in ACC’s and AFGSC’s arsenals). We’re going to spend a lot of time on these two submersibles!

It’s slower-paced, and tech-heavy, but given the feedback I’ve gotten, this is what my readers want. And we end here – time to tell some tall tales!

Chapter Seven: The Nautilus travels along as some of the Navy personnel talk to Parkowski. They try and scare her, using references to the movies Sphere, Deep Blue Sea, and the Bermuda Triangle, but she is unphased. Lots of discussion. They see something that appears to be a giant great white shark (but much darker in color) swimming off in the distance, but it disappears off of their sensors. However, moments later, it turns and heads straight for the submarine at a high rate of speed.

The Navy personnel – Duran and Carmano – are going to try and mess with Parkowski. Later, we’ll find out that not all is what it seems and their spooky stories are too close to the truth, but right now she realizes they’re just scaring her.

This lets me change the tone of the novel a bit and make it a bit more speculative rather than realistic. I had some of it in the prologue with the mosasauruses attacking the Russian sub and here’s the second hint of that.

But it’s all related! And this is so much more focused than the last drafts. Keep the reader’s attention on the mosasaurus and the submarines. Not on Russian double agents or Havana Syndrome – both of which played large roles in the first two versions of this story.

Here we go with the marine mammal red herring. Dr. Armstrong – who I introduced a few chapters back – was a researcher on that, sent by DARPA to see if any of their dolphins (very real in this story, but were killed by the mosasauruses) are still on the loose. More on this later.

Sonar – very important here. We’ll be using it a lot both on the submersibles as well as at the habitat.

And we’ve got an intercept!

Chapter Eight: The creature – whatever it is – veers away at the last second. They continue along to the sunken submarine section that’s fairly far along in the grid.

Going to be a close call. And, unlike in Lag Delay, the danger is very, very real – no VR.

But it evades at the last second.

Remember the line about “compartmented project that ended” – we’ll revisit that in a few chapters.

And we end Chapter 8 – they’re at a piece of wreckage, and will go on and grab some stuff in the next chapter.