Category: Writing Advice
-
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
-
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
-
Position, Navigation, and Timing – GPS!
When I was a kid, if I wanted my parents to drive me to a friend’s house, I had to hope that either they knew where the address was or print out a MapQuest map to guide them. It was a very different time! Now, you just pull up the address in Google or Apple…
Ryan Patrick
-
Writing Resources
Going to collect all of the different resources that I find helpful in one post. Hope it helps someone and I’ll be referring back to it a ton later. It’ll be divided into three sections: writing craft, feedback, and business. Writing Craft Sanderson This is the “how to” of writing. The best place I recommend…
Ryan Patrick
-
Types of Rockets
Like my posts in May and June about orbits and remote sensing respectively, this is a 100-level overview on the different kinds of rockets and how they can be used in sci-fi writing. Note that I’m only going to go through the four primary methods for a rocket to get out of a gravity well,…
Ryan Patrick
author, books, indie author, indie books, nasa, news, publishing, reading, rockets, science, scifi, self-pub, self-publishing, space, spacex, writing -
How I Outline
“How do you manage to write a book?” I get this question quite a bit, from mixed-experience writing servers on Discord to my own mother in a phone call. And, despite my best efforts to sabotage myself, I have written six novels – two of which are self-published, the other four in various stages of…
-
Remote Sensing for Writers
“Captain, we can see on our sensors that the alien ship is adrift.” How often do you hear something like this in a sci-fi book, movie, or TV show? There’s nothing wrong with that line of dialog; a softer/less-technical story would fit it in without any concern. But, it could be better – and, with…
-
6 Months of Sales
As anyone who’s worked with me in a professional setting knows, I’m always open and honest, even to a fault. I’m going to be like that with my book sales too. I’m planning to give an update every 6 months, with all of my successes or failures highlighted for the world to see. It might…
Ryan Patrick
-
Orbits for Sci-Fi Writers
When I alpha or beta read, or when I see published works involving topics that I am well-versed in from my professional life – astrodynamics, space-to-ground communications, orbits, etc – I often cringe. Most authors at least try to get the high-level stuff right, but get lost in the details, while others simply don’t understand…
Ryan Patrick
-
Alpha, Beta, and ARC Reading
I have a little more free time this week and I need a bit of a break from my current WIPs…so I decided to write a post about alpha, beta, and ARC reading and why they’re different. Alpha Reading Alpha reading for a less-polished work. It can be a first draft, but is generally a…
Ryan Patrick
Ryan M. Patrick 