Category: Writing Advice
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Crush Depth 10: Redo!
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…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 9: The Plot Thickens – Chapters 15-17
Previous blog posts in this series are found at the bottom of the Crush Depth main page. Chapter 14 ended with a dead-end – the yacht that had no connection to the Vepr or any of their mission. Again, that’s probably a weak plot point but the character development and some interesting nuggets that I…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 7: The Mystery Deepens – Chapters 9-11
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…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 5 – To the Habitat! Chapters 3-5
So far, I’ve: And now we’re going to discuss Chapters 3 through 5! Chapter 3: Parkowski travels down an elevator on the oil rig to the habitat. The journey is like Deep Storm’s but the habitat below is like Sphere’s. At the end of Chapter 2, Grace Parkowski, the main character, is told that she’s…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 4: Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2
In my update early last month, I talked about how I wasn’t happy with the last draft of Crush Depth and how I was going to start over. Here, the first in the series, I did a postmortem to figure out where I went wrong. Then I did a 3-act summary and expanded that into…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 3: From 3 Acts to 45 Chapters
In part 1, I did a postmortem of what I did wrong with the second draft of Crush Depth. In part 2, I took my new one-sentence plan for the novel and expanded it to three acts. And this is part 3, where I will expand that outline further into chapter-by-chapter descriptions that will serve…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 2: A Sentence to an Outline
Last week, I talked about what went wrong with the last version of Crush Depth and why I had to throw out a nearly 100,000 word second draft. This week, I’m going to discuss how I am going to go from a new one-sentence summary to a full 3-act outline. It’ll be followed in subsequent…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 1: In Late, Out Early!
If you read my update from earlier in the month, you know I shelved Crush Depth. It was a hard decision. It’s a 2nd draft and a story idea that I’ve spent a lot of time writing and editing since 2020. And if giving up on the manuscript last time was hard, this one was…
Ryan Patrick
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The Saturn Anomaly Update
Today, I’m going to discuss The Saturn Anomaly, the sequel to The Martian Incident and three of my biggest challenges with drafting it. The Martian Incident was originally a prequel to what became The Europan Deception, then the two books diverged – a lot. For a while, it was a trunk novel, then I had…
Ryan Patrick
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Sales and Reviews
I see a lot of discussions on Twitter (X), Discord, Facebook, and other places authors congregate about reviews and their relationship to sales. There’s a lot of chaff and misconceptions, and I might even have bought into some of them! But I’m going to go through the roughly 18 months of data that I have…
Ryan Patrick
Ryan M. Patrick 