Ryan M. Patrick

Check the Crush Depth page for the previous posts in this series.

So in Chapter 8 (the last chapter covered in my previous post) Grace Parkowski and the other two people on the submersible Nautilus narrowly evaded a near-ramming by what they will later discover is a mosasaur and then discovered part of the sunken Russian submarine Vepr.

A note – I’m going to start deviating from my outline somewhat here. This is a normal part of my writing process. However, I’m still going to include the original chapter outline to document the changes made.

Chapter Nine: The submersible removes a few pieces from it and leaves the site. The crew is tight-lipped about the submarine – they insist it’s a Russian sub, but some of the lettering is in English. They return to the habitat and she meets Captain Vasco.

The first clue that there’s more to this piece of wreckage than meets the eye. Keen readers will note that the Russians noticed an American submarine trailing them in the prologue!

They get a couple of items and head back. The Hunt for Red October joke has made all three versions of this novel!

Here we meet Captain Vasco. He was a friendly supporting character in previous drafts but in this one he’ll be the secondary antagonist.

And it’s time for dinner (meaning a conversation scene ;-)!

Chapter Ten: After making a light dinner, Parkowski goes to bed and tries to piece everything together – unsuccessfully.

Again, this is where I really started to deviate and didn’t do a good job of backtracking to the outline document and updating it. But I have enough experience writing where I kind of know what I’m doing and can go with the flow.

Lots of mentions of current events.

And a half-hearted explanation of what’s going on. Parkowski buys it, but there will be more oddities later.

Lots of introspection here.

This was not part of the outline. But it came to me as I was drafting. Remember the “compartmented program that had ended” mention in the last blog post? This is it! And we’ll learn even more about it later.

And we’ll end on a banger.

Chapter Ten: The next morning, she has breakfast with Carmano, who tells her of the mysterious happenings going on in the area. The Navy woman alludes to a Russian submarine being scuttled after its capture during the Cold War, genetically modified dolphins, and more. She also lets slip that there’s a compartmented server in the lab.

I dropped a lot of this.

Gotta work my Bayesian statistics in here!

This is the most important part of the chapter. A lot of it can be cut in post but this section where I explain quantum entanglement is crucial to the climax.

Lots of lying to the main character! And then a few paragraphs later we go to the lab.

This section is a bit slower than I would have liked. It’s a lot of setup, but the plan is that the early action in the prologue and the near-miss with the mosasaur will keep the reader hooked and continuing to push forward to find out what’s really going on beneath the surface!