Tag: book-review
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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 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
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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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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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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
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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
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February 2025 Goals
Shortest month of the year! I got slightly ahead of my yearly plan in January, we’ll see if I’m able to maintain that or if I get behind. Writing Planning to get to roughly the halfway point of Crush Depth – Chapter 30 or so – and around the same with Memento Vivere (Chapter 29).…
Ryan Patrick
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End of January 2025 Wrapup
It’s been a month. My company launched our first orbital rocket, and I was part of the team supporting it. I didn’t get anywhere near as much done in my hobbies (weightlifting, writing, reading, video games) as I had planned. But it still was a successful one. Writing I finished the final developmental edits for…
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
Ryan M. Patrick 