Ryan M. Patrick

I threw out a 100,000 word completed manuscript in December of 2025.

It was the 2nd full version of Crush Depth – check out my blog post series on it if you want to know how I’ve recovered (and am now on the 4th version). And it stung. I had spent a lot of my 2025 working on it, getting everything right, but the novel just wasn’t right. It wasn’t up to my standards.

And I started over.

But as I did so, I realized that I am not a very efficient writer. I end up going down a lot of rabbit holes that waste my time and really make it hard for me to get momentum as a self-published author. With the exception of The Saturn Anomaly, which I went from idea -> outline -> draft -> finished product in about 5 months last year, most of my works take multiple full revisions to come to fruition.

So, in this first of a 3-part blog series, I’ll chronicle all of the wasted words I’ve written since I started writing seriously in 2012 after I graduated from the Air Force Academy. I’m focusing on novels only, not any of my shorter projects.

Part 2 will be the why – why am I not an efficient writer, why am I wasting words, what is going wrong.

And Part 3 will be the solutions.

Without further ado, all of my wasted projects:

2012-2014

This was my pre-AFIT days at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center in Dayton, Ohio. I wrote a lot…but didn’t finish anything! I started the project that ended up being The Europan Deception, junked it at 30,000 words, started the first version of The Martian Incident, junked that at 20,000 words, and then failed a 2nd attempt at The Europan Deception at 20,000 words. That’s 70,000 words that I’ll never see again.

2016-2019

After grad school, I started writing again. This wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it could have been. I finished The Martian Incident (90,000 words, for what it’s worth) and let it sit, then wasted 120,000 words on The Balmoran Transaction before realizing that it, too, needed to be junked in late 2019, right before COVID.

2020

The COVID year – and the first year I seriously wrote. I knocked out Lag Delay at 120,000 words before editing it down to its current 98,000 – 22,000 words wasted.

2021

I started The Europan Transaction – the last The Europan Deception idea before I got to the current iteration. I wrote 100,000 words before junking it too. In better news, that year I edited both The Martian Incident and Lag Delay using my improved writing ability.

2022

I wrote The Europan Deception at 120,000 words. I would say it was about 75% commonality with the version I released last year. I also finished final edits on The Martian Incident and Lag Delay.

2023

I wrote the first draft of Crush Depth at 120,000 words – none of which have survived into the current version. I also write Engima, which I’m going to completely rewrite at some point, at 90,000 words. But that version is going in the trunk.

2024

This was arguably my best year of writing. I wrote Trials, which is going to get released at some point, at 60,000 words. Then I rewrote The Europan Deception to its current state at 120,000 words – keeping 100,000 from the last version (losing 20,000 and adding a new 120,000). Then I started the next version of Crush Depth that came in at 100,000 words when I finished it early the next year.

2025

In addition to the quickly-junked Crush Depth, I wrote The Saturn Anomaly at 92,000 words almost all of which survived edits. I also spent time on Memento Vivere and got 60,000 words in before pausing that. I then went onto the third version of Crush Depth, got 50,000 words in, and then junked it to write the current 88,000 word version and finishing just before the end of the calendar year.

Here’s the totals:

Words Written	Words Published	Words Junked	Words Written But Not Published
1,300,000	308,000	692,000	300,000

Even though I’m well over the million-word myth that’s been attributed to a dozen well-known authors, that’s still not great. Almost 700,000 words that are totally unusable.

Why am I so inefficient? We’ll tackle that in the next post in this series.