Welcome to yet another “Writing my…” or “My thoughts on…” or whatever this is called.
Here, I’ll be discussing my thoughts about the first Oscar Pat novel, Oscar Pat: The Golden Plate.
I’ll be discussing facts, ideas, inspiration, and any other things I can remember when I was writing the first Oscar Pat book.
There will be some slight spoilers for the first book, so if you haven’t read it and wish to check it out, you can find it here
As always in these posts, I won’t be explaining the plot for you, I kinda write these assuming the reader knows the plot themselves,
So, here is your last spoiler warning, and let’s begin.
From now on, I’ll be referring to Oscar Pat: The Golden Plate as Oscar Pat 1
To start, let’s talk about original inspiration, and how it shaped Oscar Pat 1.
The original idea for Oscar Pat 1, as well as future Oscar Pat books, came in the form of a dream.
The dream was me as some weird agent in a hotel, trying to uncover the evil secrets behind the scenes, and get behind a door that was always guarded by this group of people. In the dream, I was able to turn myself invisible by clenching my fists, and after being frustrated I couldn’t get in, I just decided to turn invisible and open the door. Inside the door, was a large empty space and a corridor that I ran down. I did end up hiding in one of the rooms whilst people were looking for me, and was about to be touched by one of them. Finally, somehow I made it to a room filled with giant gears, and then I woke up.
If you’ve read the book then you can easily see how similar it is to the dream. Oscar Pat 2 was also based on a dream, but that’s a story for another time.
I added a lot of stuff and fleshed out the dream to make it more novel-like, and also make it longer. But, I wanted to keep as much as possible from the dream.
Moving on, the addition of powers was because I wanted the world to become more interesting. I knew that I needed something to keep it going, and strange abilities were how I was going to do that.
Speaking of abilities, if you’ve read the books, you’ll know that there is a thing called the ‘generation system’ where all abilities are categorized based on what year they were born. Why I implemented this, I do not know, it actually caused me to struggle with writing books 2 and 3 because it limited me a lot. But, if you’ve read books 2 and 3, you’ll see what I did with it, and I think it turned out to be interesting.
I look at Oscar Pat 1 as the start of my improvement in writing. I believe that the first Oscar Pat could be improved a lot, and probably doesn’t match my writing style at the time of writing this blog post.
I like to think that I’ve found my ‘writing style’ around the time of the second book. Primarily, the reason for this is that after Oscar Pat 1, I started writing ‘A Hobbyist’s Chance’ and then worked on Oscar Pat 2.
Fun fact about Oscar Pat 3, it wasn’t going to launch until the end of 2021. I wasn’t going to start writing it until the next secret project I’m working on is out, but after finishing two, and getting about a quarter of the way in the secret project, I found that I was unable to rest leaving Oscar Pat 3 alone. Primarily, it was because I had no idea where Oscar Pat 3 was going to go. But, I suppose I can talk about all that in another post about that book.
Not a lot of planning went into Oscar Pat 1, but that’s because it didn’t need to. I knew it would be a thing that would snowball into a bigger world, so I just left all that to the future books. Since most of it came from the initial dream, it was basically set. Some things needed to be changed and added, but it wasn’t that hard.
Alright, time for some random fun facts:
Brandon was originally called James. I don’t know when I switched to Brandon, but I probably did it because I used the name James in my other novella ‘is it snowing yet?’
The machines in the forest originally served no purpose. Originally, it was that Traz had tricked Brandon into building them to slow him down, but this was changed last minute.
The location of GPS was going to be left unnamed throughout the whole series, but ultimately, I decided to just say it was in London.
The side-effect of the invisibility device was added because it would solve all of Oscar’s problems too easily. I tend to get caught up in things like ‘why won’t they just do this?’ and ‘it’d be easier if they just did this’, so I end up getting lost and stuck trying to come up with ‘foolproof’ plans.
Alright, I think that’s all for this one. I do greatly enjoy writing the Oscar Pat series, and at the time of writing this Oscar Pat 1, 2 and 3 are out on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/kindle/series/B093KD57SC?ie=UTF8&ref_=series_rw_dp_sw
If you want news on Oscar Pat 4, you’ll be waiting a while, as I haven’t even started planning it. But, you could be reading this in the future, in which case, the series is all finished.
Thanks for reading, as always, my links are down below.
My links: https://linktr.ee/FabledByte
Arbitrary Echo: https://linktr.ee/ArbitraryEcho
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