Liberator FP2 - 17,000 words and counting...

well, it's still racing on aplenty.

Since my last update (four days ago @ 11,000 words) the book has now risen to 17,500 words, as of this afternoon. If you're in (Oxford) town centre and you wanna say "Hi!" in a faux-American accent, just drop by the Calendar Club stall in the Clarendon Centre and do so. I'm very approachable and don't bite, unless otherwise directed.

As of this week's narrative/character investigation, I realise that the cover (while relating to 'organic metamorphosis of the narrative' via its characters) actually relates to another uber-important inter-stellar twin-like union expressed elsewhere in the story.

Anyway, intrigued yet? Time for an exclusive (first draft) excerpt yet?

Hmm, here goes:

It'll be my fourth birthday, soon. Me and Sally and this Free Planet. We're all three of us intimately linked by the moment of our births. We're a trio of rowdy teenagers not knowing what to be yet. How to act. Who to look up to. To respect. To protect. It's all up in the air.

And four years isn't very long to cram in all the social accidents that amount to one's upbringing. Here on Free Planet we've always had to 'learn on the fly'.

I can't believe it's all gone so fast. One minute me and Sal, that's my non-identical twin sister, were hatching out of a massive owl egg. The next moment Puberty is upon us both and the whole world looks, smells, tastes, feels different. The wants of youth got biologically re-prioritised in the blink of an eye and our dad's considering, actually Considering, enrolling me and Sal in the Arranged Marriage Market so we can have wives/husbands chosen for us by the Free Planet housing system. That's the way it's done now, it's all left to the sniffing abilities of the communal Floating Home Diversities that flutter and flap and sing like bees across the liberated sky like protein floating in the human eye.

Most of my peers, and there aren't that many of us, aren't sure if they want to be part of some continued biological experiment 'for the good of free planet'.

“Isn't that right, Sal?”

“Not many of us, Tim.”

“You said it, girl,” there's not that many of us hybrid originals, born of this free planet. Like someone thought it would be a bad idea to have a go at making more of us once we hatched. I mean, it's not even that. Don't they know? Haven't they even at least got suspicious that their kind can interbreed? The re-wilded? Can't they scent it? Don't they have some sort of animalistic detectors up their snouts and beaks that'll make this truth transparent to them?

Or are they afraid of committing a bestial act under the gaze of the Flockers? Is that how 'mating among their kind' might be judged? Like bestiality? Like some sort of original sin?