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?

Liberator - I think I'm just going to have to 'write the fucking thing'

I have all these wild and wacky ideas for where Free Planet #2: LIBERATOR 'could go' and I'm just getting nowhere with it. It's a stalled project that's looking too far up its own righteous anus to be anything worth reading or writing.

I think I either a) have to forget it and just write something else entirely different or b) just forget all this 'scripting shit' and take the fucking bull by the horns and JUST DO IT, and screw your gay trademark claim against my use of three words. Just screw it.

There's no other way to face what will be an insanely obscure lifestyle, four years after the Free Planet simulation has been set in motion by the Morans That Be. Only the stream-of-unconsciousness totally-liberated-writing-mind approach will work with this book.

Literally, there'll be nothing like it ... until it happens ... so why worry about 'getting it right' or making it 'enjoyable for the reader'. It's gonna have kinks. It's gonna have issues. Hell, the whole planet's gonna be a real-life 'learning experience' so why shouldn't the book about it also be?

So, just write the fucking thing and publish it became the simple answer. It's not that hard. It's just words making sentences making scenes making chapters wrapped round characters on missions. I'll leave all the ruptured artery suturing for Free Planet #3: Reaper.

DAY LATER UPDATE: well, it worked. I have the first real chapter in the first real writing of the first real draft of the first real....  where was I? Oh, yes, the JUST WRITE IT ethos panned out. Exculpatory gold. And by that I mean, once I'd decided to TOTALLY GIVE MYSELF TO THE WRITING OF LIBERATOR the words came flooding out. Fourteen hundred words of it, today.

I don't need no stinking script. I just need to allow the old Hertzan Chimera writing machine to take the bull by the fucking horns and get on with it. I already had a list of characters to write about, and that's been listed out now, twelve characters. Job's basically writing itself.

ANOTHER DAY LATER UPDATE: man, this is easy as fuck. I knew it would be. Once I'd made the decision to just write the effin' thing. Ah, what a delight, what a joy, what a release. I'm back, I tells ya, Hertzie's back. And with a vengeance.

So, opening chapter's the military Free Planet sim goes live chapter that's at the end of the Custodian novel FP1. Second chapter's an insight into the Floating Homes that are made from twelve rutting party goers halfway through book one. Third chapters a reet good rough-up in the form of the Borstal Boys or Flockers..

FLOCKERS!

..the literally fascist free planet police statesmen who can do whatever the fcuk they want to ANYONE WHO GETS THE WRONG IDEA or thinks about taking the piss out of the Free Planet non-profit ideal of Creativity, Passion and Kinship. Anyone dares do owt, they gets their arse raped right proper. I've been stuck on narrative/plotholeriddling island for the last few months thinking too hard about where this middle book might go. Stuck on 6,000 words or so. I know where book three's going, so no worries. Now I'm on 9,500 words and I'm back in the writing seat, where I always have the most fun. Hacking away at the sweating coal face.

Chapter four's for tomorrow, in the notebook, long hand ... I'm not which, of the twelve chapter/characters I've decided to concentrate on for FP2: Liberator, it'll be yet. But I'll know when I start writing it. I'll probably get a message on the way in to work. A transitionary book of insights. Insights. Nowt wrong wi that for the second book of a planned trilogy, eh?

13TH NOV UPDATE: currently at 11,500 words and still going... I rewrote an entire chapter yesterday (about one of the young survivors of the Custodian novel) that's less concerned with 'narrative' and more concerned with 'character'. And it's working. There'll be another chapter today, possibly the dad, the role taken by you-second-person in Custodian. Either him or Timi, we all remember Timi the re-wilded dinosaur-dog, don't we?

Liberator - free planet #2 - back on track

after a brief (two months) distraction with the TANDEM (war world) novel project, I've picked up the reins of the LIBERATOR (free planet #2) novel and started to 'really see' where such a Natural Lottery-derived world might take humanity. Again, like Custodian, it's a split narrative novel. Where that was shared between You The People and The Custodians, this time out it'll be the conflicting viewpoints of We The People and The Monsters from Hell.

Four years since the events of Custodian (free planet #1) novel, the world is a radically different place and the quest for 'freedom' is blazing along apace. I'm currently 6,500 words into the doc version and I'm not sure whether I should invest in another mega-notebook, a-la-Tandem writing month, while I'm based in Oxford's Clarendon Centre helping out a friend with a spot of retail work for the saison de Noel and get the guts of this thing spooling nicely in my down time.

It'll not be a pretty hippy kumbaya novel -- oh, no sir no -- of that you can be assured.

The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK analogy might be worth wheeling out at this point. What mankind thought was his victory or his 'right to freedom' or his 'free planet' might not have been exactly how this particular war was lost or won. There might be a more sinister Corporate War narrative afoot that neither You The People nor The Custodians were party to. Something the other two parties might have to learn of the hard way, as turmoil starts to set in and Free Planet begins to rot from the feet up.

The CORPORATE WAR OFFICE might yet get its revenge...

Custodian - Amazon reader review - Gene Brewer, author of K-PAX

Custodian received a reader review from non other than the writer of K-PAX, Gene Brewer. He had warned me up front that it wasn't going to be a totally positive review, and he did go into his thoughts on that. But most importantly, he was very complimentary of the writing and 'couldn't stop turning the pages':

Mike Philbin's new novel isn't really a novel. There isn't much plot or development--most chapters are a lot like the ones that came before. Whatever it is, however, I kept turning the pages. Some of the images are astonishing, all are powerful, and there are moments of good humor. Mr. Philbin is a good writer, and his choice of words and syntax are sometimes striking. More importantly, the book is a scathing indictment of the socio-economic-religious culture we have become. It sticks with you long after you've finished it. Well worth the read.

Excellent.

Custodian - first five star customer review - Amazon reader Giggsy

Just back off my European hols (where I spent four weeks 'totally off the grid' doing nothing but relaxing and writing a new novel called Tandem) and this lovely FIVE STAR customer review of my Free Planet #1 novel Custodian is there on Amazon, from reader Giggsy:

Mike Philbin is back with another anti-corporate tale, another novel where he immerses you, the reader, into the book as a character. And he's getting good at it. 

This is likely his strongest work to date. 

His dystopian near-future seems so extreme at times, so odd, and so far away. And yet when you realize he's blending non-fiction (aka "The Truth") in with the fiction, you begin to realize just how near we are to losing our planet. He offers an unique presentation of his ideas that doesn't have boring economics theory, generic propaganda, or political lies.

Nice, thanks!

The Oxford Times - Local Author slot - Mike Philbin's Custodian novel

the Oxford Times has just featured Mike Philbin's new novel CUSTODIAN (Free Planet¹) in their online Local Author slot - click the above image to read the editorial or click the novel title to purchase direct.

The Research Notes of Miss Asalah Al Faghori

this is a 100-page Kindle publication that supplements events in the recently published Custodian (free planet #1) novel.

We meet central character Asalah Al Faghori who not only creates, inspires and manages the Custodian Liberation but is also the genetically enhanced host of the Natural Lottery show that infiltrates the GES or Global Evertainment System.

This digital diary allows us to witness her increasingly warped logical and frighteningly academic solution to the prison-world insanity of what she sees as the Corporate War Machine's ruination of her once-beautiful home world. We see how she comes to understand that only a 'rewilded' world, a 'de-consumerised' world, a 'jail broken' world can save mankind, as a supposed-Custodian race.

The owl-based cover refers back to the Messianic flavour of my 2008 novel Planet of the Owls but also alludes to the Moloch-worshipping i.e. Bohemian Grove's Skull & Bones, ritual symbology that will only really make its presence felt in Liberator (free planet #2) when it's all too late for our young heroine to attempt to rectify.