Free Planet² LIBERATOR

liberator final cover

free planet² LIBERATOR will be a proper horroshow, self-sufficiency, creativity, passion and kinship self-destruct rollercoaster nightmare brainf*ck survivor vs conspiracy slaughterfest.

All driven by a PARALLEL PROJECT involving the MI(C)C or Military Industrial (Congressional) Complex  that was 'beaten to the finish line' by events in book one, Custodian. We see how the events at the back end of Custodian dove-tail with the events in Liberator.

It's really nowhere near where you thought this series might have gone. Think dark global covert underbelly. Though the news that Roland Emmerich is working on a sequel to Independence Day that involves parallel history and back-engineering of alien tech threatens to scupper my so-called originality if I don't get this book out rapido!

The really annoying thing about book two's Custodian-paralleling narrative is I'm getting more and more 'messages from the ether' about the content of book 3: REAPER which is potentially gonna blow the whole Free Planet message out of the ether into another dimension entirely. The idea for this series being that, at some point in the future, all three books will be reunited in a nice fat single volume of the full Free Planet story.

LIBERATOR due in 2014.

Free Planet³ REAPER

reaper final cover

Since 2005 or so, I've been busying myself with the Free Planet issues associated with 'freeing mankind from the corporate yoke of financial slavery' and there's been a spin-off, the Free Planet novel.

It was supposed to be a one-shot event, a single expurgation of fears, despair and panic about where our race might go in the pursuit of Free Planet ideals, legacies. It came to 80,000 words at the crucial second draft, and then something magical happened. The novel ended, after a series of cuts and rewrites to the finale, in May of 2012 and I've suddenly realised I couldn't leave it there. Now is the time to announce that this novel is actually the 'first of a series' of Free Planet novels.

As you'll see from the reworked cover for this first novel in the Free Planet series, it has become free planet 1: CUSTODIAN.

It's still the same book shared consecutively by The Custodians and You The People but there'll be more importance placed upon your eponymous 'custodian' role in book one. Therefore, it suits the series better if I sacrifice the original one-shot 'free planet' title to that of 'free planet #' and bring the 'custodian' aspect of this first book more into the foreground. I mean, it's there anyway, via the Custodian Liberation but this way we get to see how 'real heroes are made' from the most unlikely of raw material.

I have a detailed notion of where such a series would go, starting with free planet 1: CUSTODIAN the free planet 2: LIBERATOR and free planet 3: REAPER (image above) -- it's going to be such a beautiful and brutal storyline. The eyes are the window to the 'black' hole. Trust me, I'm an (evil) author.

REAPER due in 2015.

Free Planet novel - CUSTODIAN - Goodreads hosting Exclusive First Chapter

just as it says on the tin, Goodreads is hosting the Exclusive First Chapter of my new novel Free Planet novel CUSTODIAN on their site.

Here's a teaser moment...

Promptly, she begins her prepared monologue, “I had a dream last night. It was a dream about our little house in the countryside. A cottage with a thatched roof and heavy oak doors. Beams in the lounge, the kitchen and the bedrooms. It was snowing outside. All the foxes and deer brought their families to our house to avoid THE CULL. You could hear the hunt dogs barking in the distance. Getting nearer. On the TV was the story about the foxes and deer arriving because we'd saved one or two of them every year.

“I don't have such a 'little house in the countryside'. I don't have a TV. And these contradictions have helped me … understand … what the events of the next few minutes are going to cause. I realised this dream is about us. Our little Group, The Custodians. You have no idea who we are. Neither so the inveterate profit-mongers we call our superiors, our sponsors. But tonight the Custodians are going to cut the heads of industry free from their enslavement to the dollar, the yuan, the t-bill. We're no longer going to allow the yoke of corporate slavery to polish the necks of mankind. It's going to be a routing of Historical Proportions. Real Freedom for all is going to Sprout. And Flourish.”

She pauses there, and places the transparent hundreds-and-thousands-filled capsule onto her tongue in a proscriptive fashion. She takes the glass of distilled water and sips from it. Swallows, with obvious effort. Looks about nostalgically and makes a frown. Then a smile appears on one side of her mouth. She drains the glass in big loud gulps. Wipes her glistening mouth with the back of her wrist. Takes a deep breath. Sets the glass down out of harm's reach. Waits...

80,000 words - SECOND DRAFT complete

CONFRONTING ONE'S CREATION IS A SCARY THING.

You don't really read what you're writing, while you're writing the first draft. You're busy 'just compiling' your ideas and your research into some sort of words on the page. The way writing goes is you do your literary best at the time of writing, you're really concentrated on the actual writing process; the vocab, the phrases, the action. Only later do you consider the possibility that there's a 'voice' in there, and you can check against it for consistency.

But the act of writing and the way the words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs, the personal glitches in your own Evertainment matrix, the way themes lift from one chapter to the next like petty thievery, the way personalities blitz through the entire structure of the book like a Supernova; that realisation doesn't come until you sit down with your first draft and begin that 'homogenise-voicing' process.

You go through, fixing, enhancing, adding, taking away; honing what you imagined to have been a 'finished first draft' but you realise was all sorts of wrong for all sorts of reasons, little reasons, big reasons. It was an Auschwitz skeleton in some parts and over-bloatedly obese in others. But was all sorts of right for reasons you'd forgotten about in the act of weaving the disparate narrative threads into prose aka 'the act of writing'.

It's this second draft read/write through that's causing me the greatest joy and the greatest consternation.

FREE PLANET the novel, is an absolutely insane fairground ride glimpse into one of our potential near futures. But it's something else, it has these quite nauseating rhythms all through it, these dislocating dissonances, these lethal edges of total and utter vomit-inducing paranoia. I knew it was going to be an unpleasant read but I didn't realise it would be such an unhinged experience. It's the nasty feeling in your guts, as The Custodians and You The People alternately do their upmost to totally fuck up whatever amount of promise this Free Planet idea may once have had.

There were a few things that needed beefing up at the end of the book, a symptom of the choice of ending I'd made during the writing of the first draft, the deletions I'd made. I had to go in and do things I really didn't want to do with the characters, the elite, the re-wilded, the world, the ending. I'm now more than happy with where this novel has gone, how it developed as a story, and especially the ending. I think it will really challenge, come 2013.

ILLUMICORP - the inspiration for The Custodian Liberation

you're gonna love this:

72,000 words - FIRST DRAFT complete

I went in, this morning, hacked out loads of superfluous endings crap and rearranged the latter part of the book so that it 'worked' but left the reader 'hanging onto an uncertain future' for himself, his fellow man and planet Earth.

It's got structure, unlike any other book I've written - you can expect 'structure' if you've spent (essentially) three years of your life 'researching' the world the book's about to inhabit - but it doesn't have classical three-act narrative structure. It has what I'd like to call CRISIS POINTS. There are several in the novel, and one or two of them had to be spliced into earlier in the novel so that later events might have more meaning; more resonance. This 'fluid architecture' was built up in different strata or layers so that the very simple "do right by" Free Planet premise (that I've taken such 'stick' over) could be properly slaughtered on the altar of dramatic sacrifice.

And there's a lot of sacrifice in the novel.

Lots of that good 'horror' stuff that so attracted me to the form. And then there's the open-ended resolution, the last few chapters involving The Illuminati? Can that really be the end?

Second draft will be the 'fleshing out and concreting of the timelines' but, as it stands, I'm VERY HAPPY with where this novel went, even though I performed my own Devil's Advocate exorcism on some of the specific Free Planet issues expressed in the Free Planet blog that became the Free Planet FREE ebook.

What I've achieved with this Free Planet novel is to 'take a naive idea' and put it through the adult grinder. It's truly horrific and asks some insane questions of Humanity, as a global race of seven billion sovereign individuals. Meat, of some intellectual/entertainment substance, has extruded out the other side and I can't wait for you all to read it.

Mike Philbin, Oxford, UK
March 29th 2012.

75,000 words - Mike Philbin talking Free Planet novel on Truth Frequency Radio.

75,000 words along (with several endings already sketched out), and last night, I was invited onto Chris & Sheree's TRUTH FREQUENCY radio show out of Texas, USA, to discuss the Free Planet novel.

"Do right by Free Planet," is all you need to keep in mind.

If we start to SEE OUR WORLD as if it already is a Free Planet. If we run the Free Planet simulation in our heads. If we explore the ideas of Creativity, Passion and Kinship. We'll come to the conclusion that it's really something we want. Keep saying it, "Free Planet, free planet," and it will come.

Here's a direct-listen link of the podcast of Mike Philbin talking Free Planet novel on Truth Frequency Radio.

Custodian novel - synopsis

Costodian novel SYNOPSIS:

"Custodian" (book one of the Free Planet series) will be my second Oxford-based novel.

Planet Of The Owls, published by Silverthought Press N.Y. in 2008 was where I really got bitten by the possibilities of my home town (Oxford) as a political backdrop to fictional momentum. Free Planet employs a hybrid narrative across alternating chapters, a technique I first explored in 'Planet of the Owls' (an owl/human hybrid).

1) The Custodians; a conspiracy of Oxford University's finest.

It's told in the classical third person. Radical elements within the student body engage themselves in the Patent Wars and start a TV show called Natural Lottery that broadcasts to the global Evertainment System, every Wednesday, 7-9 p.m., all channels, full spectrum dominance. Crazy transformations push the story towards liberation for mankind in the realms of food, shelter, water and Diversity, a re-wilded world of geographically-unbound localism.

2) You The People; that's all seven billion sovereign individuals.

It's told in the second person, written directly to You The Reader. I employed this direct-address mode in my second Silverthought Press novel Bukkakeworld. The idea is to carry you, the reader, through a physical relocation of your corporate arm of The Industry from Dusseldorf to Oxford. You are 'made redundant' in the most spectacular public fashion and your world starts to (literally) crumble, or pixellate, around you. But there's light at the end of the tunnel of death.

Or is there?

70,000 words - time for a re-alignment of the split narrative's aim

I've given my FREE PLANET novel an alternative chapter structure where THE COSTODIANS and YOU THE PEOPLE are (technically) at odds, or (supposedly) at war, with each other ...

70,000 words in, and the threads are starting to reveal their inner-most secrets, cut off their rotting limbs and sprout new wings that no one knew were there. I have this situation where a CUSTODIAN/YOU THE PEOPLE dual-migration is happening in the split narrative, loyalties are being tested, characters are starting to defect, and I have a situation where your friend is becoming your enemy and your enemy has to become your friend.

Though this appears to be an insurmountable juncture in a book that's been evolving over the last four or so years from my original Free Planet thoughts, it does have a modicum of common sense to it.

Free Planet was always a naive (child-like) concept and a book based on such was always bound to throw up a million different ethical/structural quandries. This is where the fun of writing really starts to kick in.

I feel I'm on the home stretch now - wonderful future's on it's way.

65,000 words - inspiration for The Custodians side of Free Planet.

if I was looking to throw the reader a CURVE BALL, I'd say, "One of the major thematic inspirations for what The Custodians do is best expressed by the 'elite band of assassins' in the 2008 film 'Wanted'."

In fact, as many of you know, the idea for what would eventually (this year) became the FREE PLANET novel would have started just after having watched this film in 2008/9, when I was thinking of a follow-up to my two Silverthought novels Bukkakeworld and Planet of the Owls.

I truly had no idea of Wanted's deep relevance, until today's several thousand words.



But you'll still be none the wiser, until you read the novel; it's all in the subtext, in the raison d'etre.

"Sheople or Wolfle," the choice is yours.

60,000 words and ninety billion souls...

just blasted through the 60,000 words mark and the issue of the 'ninety billion souls' (first mentioned in chapter one by Asalah Al Faghori has finally reared its gorgeous bonnet). There's a whole 'raison d'etre' moment just happened, a reason why - and it's going to revolutionise.... yawn .... oh, sorry, where was I?

This FREE PLANET novel is taking off in multi-directions I'd never considered when organising the dual-narrative structure even as recently as the start of the new year. It's moved on in leaps and bounds, of an extra-dimensional nature. And the whole universe is watching the resolution from a distant proximity and what seems far is near and what seems ancient is just about to happen. Imagine a pair of gnarly and wretched old hands choking to death a delicate young bloom, but somehow the bloom is resisting the pressure, fighting back against its compression.

It's a novel about cycles of chaaange, it's one of the most liberating things I've ever written.

55,000 words - the antedote to Evertainment - total collected consciousness

I was rattling away on 'yet more words' in the novel and suddenly found that I'd brought the massacring of naively-simplistic Free Planet idea and the Custodian Movement itself BACK FROM THE BRINK - I've now gone through 55,000 words and plenty more to go.

I'd been having a 'noticable dearth' of the sort of vivid, wild and wacky dreams transmutative levitating time-warping and other-worldly i.e. alien planet dreams that my sleeping years had been literally clogged to the hilt with, for the last three or four decades; well, the dreams were still there, they were just masking themselves from being remembered upon waking.

A writer writes, and that's all you need to do. I just let the words come out and 'solved the conundrum' of why Free Planet is a good idea. I'd been portraying the whole Free Planet CHAAANGE-over process as THE MOST HORRIFIC THING THAT'S EVER HAPPENED TO MAN KIND. And, yeah, it is my own editorial bias that split that word into 'man' and 'kind' and it still is, but that real horror will be worth it in the long run. We will be a better race because of it, once we start to understand its naively-simplistic message.

It's the process of re-'education' and if we listen to the UNCONCSCIOUS need, we can all realise that profit is the most destructive force that man-kind has ever been assaulted by, it is the REAL VAMPIRE sucking the psychic and physical life-blood from our souls, our living (connected) bodies if you like. We are under the viral attack of this manufactured War of Terror, and its 'illegal and corrupting' hierarchy or 'need to know'.

But WE are all that's important to our own salvation - we need to trust OURSELVES, and abandon the ridiculous Game that the Chess Players are making Global Society play. I'm being intentionally evasive and vague here, as I (obviously) don't wanna give anything of the book's narrative away but THE SUN, the parent of our atom-children, plays a very important part of where we're going, as a race of Free Humans.

The limitless dreams have returned, the creative process has been re-ignited.

50,000 words - war were declared!

it just happened...

...though not as you might expect. I mean, it's not your typical World War Three, in that it's not a profit-based asset strip and land grab for Future Sales Results™. But THE WHOLE WORLD is involved in the routing, and mankind will suffer enormously.

The "Free Planet" novel, at this 50,000 words turnaround juncture, is not as kumbaya! all those (misguidedly) calling the 'free planet' mentality a hippy-huggy utopia will find out when the book's released.

Free Planet (the blog and the free ebook) was, after all, my personal campaign for the last three years, and you think I'd have at least some semblance of loyalty to my own ideas, right?

You forget, I'M A HORROR WRITER at heart and I'm going to take You The People on a horror ride the likes of which you'll have never read about before.

You will be shocked to your mortal foundation, to your core.

45,000 words - now the writing really begins

It seemed sort of obvious, this morning, why it should undergo this final transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. "Free Planet" as a title exemplifies all that my last few years of research have led me to understand about the way a world economy sans-profit might be feasible and how this might be explored in a work of fiction.

The alternating chapter structure that charts the rise and fall of both The Custodians (an elite group of Oxford geneticisists and patent lawyers) and You The People (the rest of the seven billion people on the globe) was already in place prior to this final name change and the book is poised to go all the way.

As you may have noticed, there's a cunning subtitle on the new cover that further reinforces where this book might go in terms of narrative - DO RIGHT BY - and the ensuing war to reinstate Diversity to the planet and re-wild, re-plenish and re-invigorate the life of all that remain on this once-beautiful homeworld so ruthlessly ruined by The Industry and its quest for endless Growth and Profit.

The all-ruling concept "DO RIGHT BY FREE PLANET" has recently become one of the main guiding rails for both sides of the split narrative.

The book has existed in various forms since November 2008 where it was called ONE OF US. In March 2009 the YOU THE PEOPLE title was initiated, carrying the book through the next three years. The change to the name THE CUSTODIANS took place at or around Xmas 2011.

By then, I'd started to have the idea of another split/alternating-chapters narrative that I'd had in my 2008 Silverthought Press novel PLANET OF THE OWLS. And this started to dictate how the book developed, to the stage it's at now. As the ideal of life on a Corporate War-stripped planet grew and grew in my mind it made all the more sense to finally man-up and accept that the book had to be called FREE PLANET, as that's where it had been leading me all the way back through its inception in 2008 with the blog which became the informative and FREE free planet ebook.

This year, I made a commitment to finish this novel. Ten thousands words have been added in the last week or two, bringing it to the current total of 45,000 words, and it's all starting to come together.

Let me rephrase that: IT'S ALL COME APART.

Imagine this: for the last three years or so a person has been weaving a big rug by hand. The process has involved pain-stakingly selecting, colour-matching and tying thousands of separate threads together, line by line. Over the course of the last couple weeks he's somehow managed to unravel the lot of it (in a series of self-defeating sabotages of his own handiwork) and is now looking at a massive pile of fibres that he SOMEHOW has to weave back together into some sort of recogniseable item.

Yup, three years of laboriously building up some semblance of narrative drive, chapter structure and character arc with relevant research and lines of investigation into all sorts of arcane subjects associated with THE END OF THE (CORPORATE WAR) WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, all blown out of the water at this half way stage. 45,000 words in and, with about 45,000 words of real typing trauma to go, this is always the stage where the writing of a book gets real interesting for me. I'm basically 'up shit creek without a paddle' and relishing the challenge of what's to come. This is what real writing's all about - the creative escape, the Houdini moment. It's happened on every book I've ever written.

We all have the solution inside of us for such a seemingly catastrophic event as the death of Corporatism (i.e. Fascistic Communism) with one fell swoop of a hand across the Globalist Chess Table. But it's done, and my sole aim from this point onward in the novel is to help you ALL rewrite your futures so that your children's children can finally be proud of MANKIND'S ACHIEVEMENT on this delicate homeworld.

FREE PLANET novel - new blog to chart the course of this book

I've gone through a couple of iterations with the Free Planet novel, in terms of concept and content.

Now, half way (that's 40,000 words or so with a lot more plot notes than I tend to aggregate) through the first draft, this blog will chart all further updates so as not to get in the way of normal blog activity on the FREE PLANET blog.