Tag: writing-tips
-
End of Year Review
Going back to this and do a self-evaluation. Mostly good, but some big misses. The Europan Deception Easily my biggest success this year. All goals met and I couldn’t be happier with my results. Crush Depth Partial success. I did write a version of Crush Depth and got feedback on it but ended up junking…
Ryan Patrick
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Crush Depth 3: From 3 Acts to 45 Chapters
In part 1, I did a postmortem of what I did wrong with the second draft of Crush Depth. In part 2, I took my new one-sentence plan for the novel and expanded it to three acts. And this is part 3, where I will expand that outline further into chapter-by-chapter descriptions that will serve…
Ryan Patrick
-
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
-
The Saturn Anomaly Update
It’s at the Pentagon for a security review – here’s to a short turnaround! If all goes well, I’ll shoot for a December release. Here’s what I’m planning to put in the “About this Book” section at the end: If you’ve read any of my other books’ “About This Book” sections, you know that most…
Ryan Patrick
-
Crush Depth Update
Ok, so the bad news first. I’m going through feedback on Crush Depth and while it’s overwhelmingly positive, I’ve come to the realization that just it’s not the book I wanted to write. The idea isn’t dead, but the current draft doesn’t work in the way that I wanted it to – for a number…
Ryan Patrick
-
How I Edit
Following on from my posts How I Outline and How I Draft, here’s How I Edit! First Things First I don’t edit while I write – at all. If I know there’s an issue, I take a note in my notebook or make a comment in Word. This helps me keep going to get to…
Ryan Patrick
-
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
Ryan M. Patrick 