Category: Writing Advice
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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
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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
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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
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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…
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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…
Ryan M. Patrick 