Ryan M. Patrick

These have been done for a week or so but I’m just getting around to doing this now. Old ones are here at the bottom of the page.

If you saw my last post you know that I went back and rewrote a ton of what I have, mostly in a flow state in the first 2 weeks of this month (December 2025). Same characters, same core plot, but stripping away a lot of the geopolitical thriller and intelligence community stuff from the plot in favor of focusing on the mosasaurs and the quantum technology. It took a lot less time to do that than originally draft them, think more along the lines of 1 month versus 3 months, and they’re messy – there’s a lot of cleanup to do. But I love what I have.

Onward to the new chapters (with the new outline!):

Chapter Eighteen: Returning to the habitat, the team analyzes the creature encounter. Lots of discussion. Seaquest is still out there recovering the torpedo and Vasquez makes some calls back – he’s being shadowed as well. More speculation about the creatures and what they want. Parkowski is at the center as they prepare to install the core and see what they have.

This is quite different than what I had before, and really where the plots started to diverge.

They get back quickly – that was mostly in Chapter Seventeen.

This was one of the biggest changes from the last, aborted version. The crew on the Atlantis habitat was too small – just twelve people, almost all of them named characters, and not all of them had full character arcs. In this one, I’m focusing on five characters who will survive to the end (no spoilers here! at least not yet) but giving the habitat more of a “small town” feel.

Lots of technical details! I love how this is turning out. All of my research is paying off.

And a lot of details I put in earlier are now paying off.

That “big one” is going to be key in later chapters!

Chapter Nineteen: As Vasquez returns, sonar detects a swarm of contacts approaching the habitat. Parkowski’s gambit from the last chapter. They discuss their options for defense. Lots of technical details, really lean on her background as an electrical engineer. The creatures attack the Seaquest.

I’ve struggled with character deaths in my earlier books – they’re either too sudden or too drawn out, and a lot of the time they don’t have the emotional impact I want. That is, outside of Dr. Pham’s death in Lag Delay. Vasquez is a named character and has a lot of screen time early, like Dr. Pham…but you can just tell that he’s going to get it.

They’re going to try to start fighting back. Like a lot of other things, this is better done in this version of the draft.

Lots of technobabble, but it’s what my readers want!

This is some of my best writing. We’re raising the tension tremendously and we’re not even halfway in!

I’ve also been adding these 1-2 sentence chapter ends from the mosasaurs’ perspective. We’ll see if they survive edits.

Chapter Twenty: Parkowski rushes to the moon pool to see the Seaquest returns, damaged by a direct creature attack. Vasquez is injured – severely. The crew debates aborting the mission as the entities probe the habitat’s defenses but they don’t want to risk going up the elevator until it’s safe. Vasco orders microtorpedoes fired at the creatures but none of them find their target. Parkowski continues to work on the core in the lab – it was slightly damaged by the last effort, but she manages to start it back toward a normal state.

The attack has begun.

Lots of engineering and technical stuff. I think I do a better job here than in Lag Delay of getting inside Grace’s head, but my readers will be the judge of that!

And more.

Unfortunately, no one is listening.

To be continued in the new year! I’m on roughly Chapter Thirty-Five right now so I’ll be able to pump a few of these out in January.

And I hope this is helping someone! This is my writing process, for better or for worse. There’s a lot of false starts and wasted words and it’s why I’m only able to get a book out a year right now. I’ll probably do a longer blog post on all of my failed projects and another one on how I plan on improving my process going forward.