Thank you so much to all our wonderful backers who have got us this far.
In celebration of this important milestone, here is a little extract from the book. This is from Peter, the group's conceptual artist, whose main goal in life is to make everyone else feel uncomfortable:
From: peterpeterpeterpeter@gmail.com
To: Crawley Writers Group
Sent: 24.01.1, 12:12
Subject: Who took my corkscrew?
People were not to be upset by my live writing experiment. I’m very interested in metafictive discourse as you know, and I wanted to 'write down' the experience of 'writing down' my experience as it happened. To do this during a writer’s group added an extra layer of narrative recursion which pleased me greatly. What is it like to experience someone experiencing you? And, of course, what is it like to experience the experiencing of that experience?
Obviously the only way I could do this was to ‘mirror’ - dictating my thoughts live to a piece of voice recognition software, which of course also meant recording my observations of people’s reactions to me recording my observations about them being recorded. This might have been a bit frustrating at times (eg when I said things like, ‘Tom sits down and scratches his behind, then tries to surreptitiously remove a piece of crusted mucus from his nose, and wipe it on my cushion… Now Tom looks at me with great hostility for a very brief moment, then recovers himself and smiles very sweetly in a way which he hopes will cover up his earlier expression of hostility…. Now Tom looks for a moment as if he’s going to hit me, then sits back, raises his wine glass with an ironic "Cheers" and gives me a two-fingered gesture which he hopes will be interpreted as the ironic gesture of a good sport’ etc etc.) But I trust that the seriousness of the artistic purpose was at least clear.
Obviously it might have allayed some of the possible friction which ensued if I’d told you what I was doing beforehand, but then of course the authenticity of the experiment would have been entirely undermined.
Peter
PS If you took my corkscrew, please can you return it? It's about the only thing I have left from the Convent.