Writing my novel: ‘A Hobbyist’s Chance’

Welcome back to ‘Writing my…’ or ‘My Thoughts on…’ or whatever this series was called. Where I talk about things that I’ve written, and go over my process, cut ideas, random facts, my thoughts on it or just general gibberish. Today, we’ll be talking about A Hobbyist’s Chance, a novel that I released back in November 2020.

I won’t be explaining anything about the story here, and I will be going into spoilers, so if you wish to check it out to get an understanding of what I’m talking about, it’s cheap as an E-book on Amazon, and you can find the link here:

Now, as I said, there will be spoilers, so let’s begin,

A Hobbyist’s Chance tells a story from multiple points of view, at first, I thought it’d be hard for me to write this, I’m an amateur and that kind of thing seemed really advanced.

But, what I didn’t know at the time, was how much fun I’d have writing it.

Strangely, I don’t remember much about writing it, I believe I wrote it when I was at university, but because of COVID, my time in my final year of university was cut short, and I might have finished it at home.

But I’m not 100% on that. 

I have vague memories of me typing away at 1 in the morning in my dark university room, but can’t fully remember.

The reason why I enjoyed writing it so much is because of the similarities to myself.

The main character is a university student, with an interest in music and writing, and is nihilistic. It basically is me at that point.

But, that’s where the similarities stop.

Sadly I never got a job with an idol group, or had an editor or even did a music degree. I’d say he’s a bit more extreme than I am. I consider the main character to be an asshole and not really a good role model. (although I’m sure some people would also consider me to be an asshole, so that could be another similarity)

It’s primarily fiction. Like most fiction, characters are based on people we know or experience. And, I just experience myself the best. But, of course, my opinion on if the character is based off me or not is biased, as not only did I wrote the character, but I also made that connection. Perhaps if someone that knew me read it, they’d be able to say if it is similar to me or not.

It does, however, have a lot of my ideas on life in it. My thoughts on the music industry are in there a bit, as well as my thoughts on writing. But they are just a few sentences.

The pieces of music Lucas speaks about are also pieces of music that have great importance to me. The pieces are some of my all-time favourites. I highly recommend you check them out if you wish, mainly Schubert’s Serenade and Chopin’s 4 ballades.

There isn’t any hidden meaning to it, I just wanted to write a romance as I really enjoy writing romance.

Anyway, I ended up enjoying it so much, that I wrote it fairly quickly, with little planning, it just kinda fell into place. That was until the last few chapters.

It was hard for me to come up with the resolutions, I knew how it was going to end since the start, but getting the characters to that point was tedious.

I knew I wanted the groups to all meet up, but I wasn’t fully convinced of what should happen or who should go. Originally, Dave wasn’t going to go with Lucas and Mia to meet Luna. It was just going to be the three of them, but as I kept writing, I felt as if I needed to have Dave’s story come to a close, rather than an abrupt ending.

I thought about extending it to flesh out the stories some more, but decided against it as I knew that would probably make it worse. I tend to only include things I believe to be necessary and dislike the idea of filling out pages with unimportant information just to meet a word/page count.

There isn’t much else I can talk about in regards to this novel, but I have a few little fun facts to mention.

Once I finished writing, I wished I wrote more about Simon Mud, as well as extended the bits on the pressure from the music industry that is killing people.

There was originally going to be a doodle at the back of the physical copy. It was going to be the picture of the YYY members and Lucas (the one mentioned in the later chapters).

Speaking of YYY, the name came about when I typed on my keyboard YYY. There was no thinking to it and it has no meaning, I just needed a simple name.

The name, A Hobbyist’s Chance, was created the week before I released it. Originally, I just always referred to it as Lucas and Mia. Even now, I still do whenever I think about it or talk about it.

It’s the biggest physical novel I’ve written at 309 pages long, but if you took out all the duplicate stuff and only count the unique events, it may be much shorter.

And, there is a little prequel on this blog. A little short story about Lucas and Mia’s first meeting. You can find it here.

That’s all for this “Writing my…” I have plans to speak about my other novels, but I’ll do that some other time. 

I’m pretty sure I covered most things. There isn’t much as it was just a typical romance so I have nothing special to add.

Thanks for reading, as always, below are my links.

My links: https://linktr.ee/FabledByte

Arbitrary Echo: https://linktr.ee/ArbitraryEcho