Ryan M. Patrick

I’ve talked a lot about wasted words and improving the process. I thought I had finally gotten past it – The Kuiper Dominion I more-or-less kept the same throughout, and I had just been blowing through Memento Vivere since I picked that project back up. I even posted this week about the progress I’m making.

And yet in the middle of the week this week, I decided to throw out all 80,000 words and start over.

Memento Vivere is a very different novel than my first six. It’s fantasy, not a sci-fi or techonthriller, and it’s primary world fantasy like Tim Powers‘ books. It’s set in the area I grew up in, Downingtown and West Chester in Chester County, PA. And it’s probably the closest I have to a self-insert main character in Matt Kovar. I’m Italian, Slovak, and Hungarian as opposed to Kovar’s Czech and Hungarian background (which is incredibly important to the main plot!) and I went to the U.S. Air Force Academy instead of West Point. But from a personality standpoint, from a family standpoint, from a faith standpoint, from a character standpoint Kovar is very similar to me. Much more so than any of my other protagonists (John Cameron, Grace Parkowski, Mark Clancy). So I have to really get this one right.

The plot is a doozy. I am trying to combine:

• Proto-Indo-European language and its descendants
• Proto-Indo-European migration
• The Proto-Indo-European “world tree”
• Catholicism, namely Christ’s victory over evil on the True Cross
• Genetic memory
• The Nephilim
• The scientific nature of reality
• “True names” of things (Like Rumpelstiltskin)
• My hometown area

Into a coherent novel that stars a GWOT-era Army veteran, a beautiful goth waitress from his past who is a devout Catholic, and a defrocked priest who is paid by the Vatican to keep a watch on Chester County.

And I thought I had it. The core concept came to me in mid-2024 about a GWOT-era veteran coming home from a deployment to bury his grandfather, finding a spellbook in the attic, and fighting back against an evil conspiracy that threatened his hometown. And of course I set it in the area I knew best and started outlining and writing. I stopped in mid-2025 when I got stuck about halfway through and other projects (The Saturn Anomaly, Crush Depth) took over. But I always was going to come back to it after I finished The Kuiper Dominion and had fixed all of the issues that had gotten me stuck.

Or so I had thought.

I got another 20,000 or so words in and then on Tuesday of this week realized that the whole thing wasn’t going to work. I had a lot of really good ideas (see the list above!) but they weren’t coming together in a coherent story. And worst of all, they were missing the big Tim Powers piece – magic exists, is real, and has a cost. Matt Kovar paid no cost to slinging spells across suburban Pennsylvania against his opponents! I was trying to do too much without really understanding how the pieces all fit together.

Even worse, the structure was wrong. It didn’t have the Powers sense of discovery – everything was told up front, then it was a breakneck thriller to the climax. This kind of novel needs information meted out in small amounts over time. It can be a thriller, but the pace needs to be just right.

So I spent the week outlining. The first 6 chapters – him flying home, talking with his family, the funeral, meeting with his high school friends, finding the spellbook – those were fine with some small changes. The rest had to go.

And now it’s a drastically different novel. The nightmares are visions of the steppe, not a graveyard. And each time Kovar uses a spell, he loses a bit of himself – his memory, pulling him into the shared genetic consciousness of all of his ancestors who had stopped the Nephilim from unmaking reality/undoing Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross/destroying the Proto-Indo-European world tree (depending on how you look at it!). He can cast the spells in the grimoire because he is a combination of two bloodlines – the first off the steppe into Europe (the Czechs) and one of the last (the Hungarians). Chester County is unique because it is the edge of the piedmont between the coastal plain and mountains; reality is slightly less tethered to the physical world there. The Nephilim are shaping the geology of the area through developing it from farmland to suburbia to help in their ritual.

It all fits together nicely now, and it works.

But most importantly, I’m excited about writing it. It’s a character-first novel, which is a first for me, and the outline feels like a Tim Powers novel. Just one to be written by a Philly-area millennial. Looking to have the initial draft done early next year!