Category: Writing Advice
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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
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How I Edit
Following on from my posts How I Outline and How I Draft, here’s How I Edit! First Things First I don’t edit while I write – at all. If I know there’s an issue, I take a note in my notebook or make a comment in Word. This helps me keep going to get to…
Ryan Patrick
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Common Beta Reader Mistakes
I alpha and beta read a lot – see this post for what that entails – for my critique partners. Here’s a quick post on some of the things I often see when I’m reading. Taking Too Long to Get Started There’s some advice that I heard, I think for the first time on the…
Ryan Patrick
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Me and the Fantasy Genre
Quick blog post on my complicated relationship with the fantasy genre. For two of the genres I write in – sci-fi and technothrillers – my interest is almost self-explanatory. I’m an astronautical engineer who has been fascinated with space since I was a child, of course I’m going to want to read and write books…
Ryan Patrick
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Pentagon Prepublication Review
I’ve talked a lot, both here and on Twitter, about how all of my books have to go through a prepublication security review. But what is it? Who has to do it? How much of a pain is it? If you’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with the U.S. government for a security clearance, you’ve entered…
Ryan Patrick
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Atlantis and My Sci-Fi Series
Now that I’m finally going to release The Europan Deception (my sci-fi thriller set 200 years in the future) next year – unless the Pentagon pre-publication review takes too long – I wanted to write a bit on the ancient legend that underpins the entire series of 8 planned books. Atlantis first appears in Plato’s…
Ryan Patrick
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Short Stories
There’s a lot of different story lengths for fiction. There’s flash fiction – generally anything under 1500 words, novellas at 15,000 to roughly 45-50,000, and novels above 50k. Short stories – those generally between 1,500 words and 7,500 words, but sometimes can go up to 10,000 – are an area that I am actively trying…
Ryan Patrick
Ryan M. Patrick 