Tag: fantasy
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Crush Depth 9: The Plot Thickens – Chapters 15-17
Previous blog posts in this series are found at the bottom of the Crush Depth main page. Chapter 14 ended with a dead-end – the yacht that had no connection to the Vepr or any of their mission. Again, that’s probably a weak plot point but the character development and some interesting nuggets that I…
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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End of October/Beginning of November
A great month both in my personal/professional life and my writing one! Crush Depth Lots of blog posts on this; check the book page (click on the title above) to see them all. I wrote 30,000 words this month. I had hoped for about half that but outlining took a lot less time than I…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 7: The Mystery Deepens – Chapters 9-11
Check the Crush Depth page for the previous posts in this series. So in Chapter 8 (the last chapter covered in my previous post) Grace Parkowski and the other two people on the submersible Nautilus narrowly evaded a near-ramming by what they will later discover is a mosasaur and then discovered part of the sunken…
Ryan Patrick
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Crush Depth 5 – To the Habitat! Chapters 3-5
So far, I’ve: And now we’re going to discuss Chapters 3 through 5! Chapter 3: Parkowski travels down an elevator on the oil rig to the habitat. The journey is like Deep Storm’s but the habitat below is like Sphere’s. At the end of Chapter 2, Grace Parkowski, the main character, is told that she’s…
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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End of September/Beginning of October 2025
An absolute whirlwind of a month. It was fun while it lasted but I’m glad it’s over! Crush Depth I’ve decided to shelve the current version – you can read about that here. But I’m making a lot of progress on the next iteration – read about my progress here (where I do a quick…
Ryan Patrick
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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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End of August/Beginning of September 2025 Update
Another month in the books! Actually got a few blog posts in, but wrote a bit slower than I would have liked. Crush Depth Feedback is still trickling in, and I decided to get The Saturn Anomaly out the door to my beta readers before I really dive into the feedback. Still, I don’t think…
Ryan Patrick
Ryan M. Patrick 