Tag: book-review
-
Crush Depth 20: Chapters 42-Epilogue – The End
Old posts are on the main Crush Depth page at the bottom. This is the end! Chapter Forty-Two: Pick up as soon as the last chapter ended. The survivors board the Nautilus; mosasaurs gently guide the submersible upward taking into account “the bends”. Lots of discussion and speculation, and a few points where they think…
-
Crush Depth 19: Chapters 39-41 – Conversation
Previous posts are on the main Crush Depth page at the bottom. This is the part of the novel I’m the least sure about and that I’m likely going to fix the most in edits. The core concept is fine, but I think the pacing is wonky. More to come in edits. Chapter Thirty-Nine: It…
Ryan Patrick
-
Crush Depth 14: Chapters 24-26 – The Aftermath
Older posts can be found at the bottom of the main Crush Depth page. In the last post, the mosasaurs attacked in waves and the crew of the habitat fought them off. This is somewhat different than the first two Crush Depth drafts where there was one big attack that the submarine wasn’t able to…
Ryan Patrick
-
Crush Depth 12: Chapters 18-20 – Just Before the Big Attack
These have been done for a week or so but I’m just getting around to doing this now. Old ones are here at the bottom of the page. If you saw my last post you know that I went back and rewrote a ton of what I have, mostly in a flow state in the…
Ryan Patrick
-
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
-
Crush Depth 8: Investigation – Chapters 12-14
The other posts in this series taking you deep inside my writing process are found on the main Crush Depth page. A note that I’m probably taking about a month or so off on these posts while I fix some (small) issues – I got a bit stuck on Chapter 19 – but I’ll be…
Ryan Patrick
-
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
-
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
-
February 2025 Wrap-up
Not a great month. Washing machine broke, layoffs at work (I survived, many of my friends did not), and just awful weather for the most part in the DC area. But there was a lot of good on the writing side. Writing Against all odds, The Europan Deception came back from the Pentagon after only…
Ryan Patrick
-
Top 10 Favorite Books
I didn’t do a yearly wrap-up of the best books I read in 2024 – will do one at the conclusion of 2025! – but I wanted to do something similar with my all-time favorite books. I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a child. I started at a very early age and was…
Ryan Patrick
Ryan M. Patrick 