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.