Ryan M. Patrick

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before (and no, I’m not singing “Miami” by Taking Back Sunday) – I’m rewriting Crush Depth.

I noted in my last update that I had slowed down. I wasn’t getting the words out. It wasn’t fun anymore.

So I did what I normally do – I converted my manuscript to .epub (Calibre is great for this) and read it all in 1 night, reading like I would any other book.

And it had the same issues as the last draft.

The mosasaurs – while they appear much, much earlier – aren’t scary. Aren’t present. They’re just a big creature that buzzes the Nautilus and a bunch of sonar contacts that are currently unexplained.

But what was worse were the characters. They were all the same – wooden military types. And given that Grace Parkowski isn’t my most dynamic character herself…we have an issue.

I had a huge problem on my hands.

I did some research. Rewatched Sphere again, then The Abyss. Read this article on the movie Jaws. And realized I needed to do three things.

The first is to cut the plot to the bones. No espionage, no double-agents, no hidden agenda amongst the crew. This is really, really hard for me. I grew up reading Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. I want to have spies everywhere. But this is not that kind of novel. The two things I’m exploring are the mosasaurs – giant, sentient underwater reptiles that have some connection to quantum entanglement – and quantum computing. Everything else is tangential.

The next is to play up the horror aspects inherent to the setting. The sea is treacherous, unforgiving, and the bottom of the Atlantic even more so. The mosasaurs need to be present and scary. On top of that, the habitat itself needs to be a character almost in and of itself, only a few inches of steel separating the POV character from the crushing depths beyond.

The final is the characters. I’m actually going to be going on a podcast next month to discuss this, but “write what you know” is incredibly dangerous advice. I have been in the military/aerospace sphere my entire adult life – I know how a mission to the bottom of the ocean to recover a Russian submarine would operate. I know what cast of characters would be involved. But it leads to a boring story full of wooden characters. I rebooted the cast. AI was very helpful here – I asked what roles would need to be filled for an undersea expedition based on the aforementioned movies and between Claude and Grok got a pretty good list. It’s also helped me with some of my quantum technology questions. I’ll probably do a bigger post on AI usage later but while I’ll die before I let AI write a single word of my book, from a brainstorming or research perspective it’s a huge help.

I went back to the prologue and started reworking it. I started this in the background while I kept plugging away at the now-defunct version 3 of my draft on the 25th of November and really began in earnest on Sunday (30 Nov) when I figured out some of the big pieces (namely the characters). The plot is the same, the tone and characters could not be more different. It’s amazing what just a few sentences or atmospheric details can do!

And I’ve been going to town – if you follow me on Twitter/X (you should!) I’ve been pretty quiet. Every free moment I have away from my family or work has been spent on this. No video games, no sports on TV – the only thing I’ve kept has been my workout schedule. And holy crap is it good.

I had a few beers on Tuesday evening after my kids went to bed and ended up writing late into the night. And when I read it the next day I got chills from the following passage – check it out.

I’m shockingly close to where I was before I started this experiment – just before the mosasaurs begin their full-force attack on the habitat. I’m slightly underwriting my goal but I think I have a scene or two to slip in and I’m still planning to get to 90,000 words by the end of next month – but probably just barely. It’s a single-POV, single-location story so I can’t stretch it out that much!

I’ll post again next week on my new Chapters 18-20.