The Whitechapel Project

So, I’m still crazy busy, but episode 16 was pretty quick to write, all told. Part of that is because I tried out a new process.

Previous, I would write every draft of the episode in OpenOffice 3. I would write the first 1000 words the first day, and then the next day I would go back and edit that 1000 words before finishing up the episode. While initially this helped me to get back into the swing of writing, more often than not it meant I would dick around with revision, and just when I was getting into the swing of that, I would have to write again. More and more I’m coming to appreciate that my brain really works in different ways when I’m writing and when I’m editing, so I decided to look into options to help me keep those spaces separate when I’m writing.

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Not a lot to say about this episode, honestly. The voting was to learn a bit more about Liz, so I did that while seeding another part of the puzzle to come. Really, I’m trying to get things moving to the act three break, which means that things have to get worse for Six before they can get better. I’m getting pretty comfortable with writing scenes where Six is in his own head, so maybe I need to work towars other kinds of scenes going forward. I’ll have to think about that. (To be fair, I’ve been really ill since just after I posted the last episode, so I’m a little spacey right now — if there’s something I’m forgetting about the writing of this episode, I’ll go back and update this entry.)

In other news, I’ve moved my personal blog over to WordPress as well, so you can find that now at http://eddyfate.com. That blog is about writing, game design, gaming, and general geekery, so if any of that’s stuff you like, go ahead and check it out. For those following my LiveJournal, both this blog and eddyfate.com will feed into the LJ, so no need to change your subscriptions if you don’t want to.

Episode 14 was both the easiest and hardest episode of Whitechapel I’ve written thus far.

It was easy because, in many ways, it’s an episode I’ve had in mind in some form for months. Even the voting went the way I was hoping (for the first time ever, I might add), so it was great that I didn’t need to think about it or do any planning or try to make it all hold together — I could dive right in and really go to town on a scene I’ve been looking forward to.

It was hard because I made myself incredibly uncomfortable writing it. I’m not sure it’s the scariest or goriest stuff I’ve written, but it’s certainly the most intimate.

I’ve always had a bad relationship with death, because a lot of people in my life have died suddenly and tragically. Some of my first memories are of a cousin of mine who died one night in her sleep. I dumped my step-father’s ashes into Lake Erie after a prolonged fight with cancer. I just buried my grandmom earlier this year, and a friend just died earlier this week. I won’t go so far as to say that death has dogged my every step, but I’m certainly no stranger to it, and it’s been a part of my life more in the past six months than it has ever before in my life.

Maybe that’s the reason why I write horror and crime drama, so that I can try to come to terms with it. Some people block it, some drink, and some just obsess about it for weeks and weeks. I put all that grief and pain and anguish into stories about horrible people doing horrible things. (And I drink.) I think it’s a balance that a lot of horror writers have to come to terms with, that darkness within that they have to tap and spin onto the page. If it works well, you can tell an amazing story, even if you end up with a few sleepless nights as a result. But hey, if I’m going to lose sleep to my inner demons anyhow, might as well entertain some people along the way.

I was still uncomfortable when it came time to record. Rather than shy away from it, I tried to throw myself into the performance, and for the first time I did the whole episode in nearly one take. I recorded and had it edited and up in record time.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on both the writing and the performance, which I greatly appreciate — thank you for the support.

It helps me to come to terms with my own demons.

Man, things have been crazy this week. Gained a car, lost a fuel pump on a different car, ended up selling that car only to not be able to sell it, all while shopping for houses and guest-hosting another podcast (the Darker Days podcast for you White Wolf fans). It was only through a few things falling apart tonight that I was even able to have time to write a post-mortem this week. Lucky for all five of you who read it.

Just about every writer I know goes through a phase where they’re just sick of working on a project. It’s usually around the middle of the project, that point where they just look at everything they’ve written, think it’s all crap, and can’t face putting down another word forward. It’s the point where many people just abandon the project and find something else to do, but some force themselves to sit down and crank out just a few hundred more words.

I hit that point with this episode. I threw a null choice at the end of episode 12 just to round out the set, and ended up getting that choice delivered to me. I had no idea how to work a house into the episode. Further, I knew instinctively that I needed to have this episode have some kind of action in it, but wasn’t sure how I was going to get from episode 12 to an exciting end of some kind in episode 13. So, on Sunday, with deadline looming, I just starting throwing down words on paper and hoped that something coherent came out.

As I wrote, I suddenly put a lot of pieces together in my head — things I’ve been sitting on for weeks and months all just clicked in my head. The characters flowed, the scene made sense, and I had a clear picture of how it was all going to end up. (Of course, some revelations made me want to go back and rewrite some earlier episodes, but I held firm. I will continue on with the material I have thus far created.)

Whitechapel is over half over, and I feel for the first time that things are starting to wrap up. I’m already seeing a way ahead (not the way ahead, since I’ve learned never to trust how you bastards will vote), but I’m not entirely sure how it will all end. While I have a bit more insight behind the curtain, in many ways I’ve reached a point where I’m learning about Six as much as you guys are.

And that’s amazingly cool. I’m looking forward to uncovering the next episode.

I realized going into this episode that the setup was similar to earlier episodes — a mysterious figure leading Six into a car and driving him around, and having some connection to one of Six’s memories from episode one — so I tried to play with the formula a bit. Since the voting was so overwhelmingly against her being involved in some sort of trap, I not only turned the black van into a red herring, but I also dropped another piece of information I had been holding on to: Mister Rich’s real name, and the organization he works for. Of course, I’m setting up that Liz and Mister Rich are going to be at odds in how they interact with Six.

The car wash thing was something I’ve had in mind for a couple of episodes, once I realized that Six was bugged (or at least, is told he’s bugged). There are times when I can’t even get cell reception in a car wash, and I certainly can barely hear anything in some of them, so it seemed a plausible (if really odd) location.

At one point, I was going to make Liz European. While Michelle can do a decent variety of European accents, they weren’t working for me, so I told her to revert to her normal accent. I had a brief joke about pants/underwear lined up that I had to cut, but the change in accent still works with a few options I had in mind.

The choices at the end of the episode seem a bit random, but I have a few ideas on what will happen next based on them. To take the one that won’t get voted in by the end of the night as an example, if she had gone back to the hotel she would just be in town for a few days, and that would have set up the next encounter. And there will likely be some form of bad encounter soon — Six has been having it easy the past couple of episodes.

Before I start, a few pieces of news.

First off, as you’ve no doubt noticed by now, this is nearly a week late, and episode twelve will be similarly behind. I go into some detail over at my personal blog, but the long and the short of it is that my grandmother-in-law passed away very suddenly, and I had to drop everything to deal with that. If all goes well, I should be able to get episode twelve written and up by next Wednesday. Between illness and personal tragedy, 2010 is not off to a great start.

Secondly, I now have a regular Thursday evening obligation, so I’ll be moving these post-mortems back to Wednesday. Since the voting will still be going on, I’m going to drop that segment unless it’s relevant to the episode I’m discussing.

Finally, in a bit of good news, the cover for the anthology Close Encounters of the Urban Kind has been revealed. I’ve sold a story to this (“Gloomy Sunday”), and I’ll pass along the pre-order information once I have it.

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Because of a big plot development in episode ten, I’m putting the entire post-mortem behind a cut. Normally I assume you’ve already read or listened to the episode before you read the post-mortem, but in this case you definitely should if you want to avoid spoilers.

You have been warned.

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Quick note before I dive in: yes, there isn’t any post-mortem for episode 8. I was hella busy that week preparing for a LARP event, and I thought I could catch up on that during the Q&A that got canceled. If someone really has a question about the writing process for episode 8, I’ll answer it in the comments, but otherwise I’ll just dive into episode 9 and move forward.

Author’s Commentary

Because of the previously-mentioned LARP event, I only did a couple hundred words on Saturday, and really didn’t have a chance to write a full draft at all until Sunday night. Worse, I really had no idea what was going to happen (aside from laying the tracks to the next plot point). To top it all off, I had a tie vote in the poll. So I did a lot of hasty and heavy writing and rewriting on really short notice. And yet, I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Such is the creative process.

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Author’s Commentary

This episode was initially pretty tough — I kind of knew where I wanted to go, but the first time I sat down to write this, it just didn’t come out. I barely got 500 words in before I called it a day. Then I watched some television and movies, just trying to find the vibe of Whitechapel again. The next day, I sat down and banged out the entire episode in pretty much one shot. That’s just how writing is, sometimes.

Anyhow, I came into this with two goals: write Mister Rich out (even for a short time), and kill someone else. The former was for a couple of reasons — to give David (the voice talent for Mister Rich) a break from recording dozens of lines every episode, and because this serial is really about Six, and I wanted to keep the focus there. The latter was because it was a good time to cash in the winner of the second Agent Mission, and the appearance of two unnamed cops was a good opportunity for that.

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Author’s Commentary

This was a weird episode to write in a couple of ways. The first half was really simple, because it was essentially the exposition I expected to get to in episode five, more or less. When that ran out, I also got to address a point that got cut from the last episode — that Six needs a shower.

Once he was in the shower, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I started with him reviewing the information and putting it all together (something I’ve done a lot in previous episodes), but I realized about halfway through that this has got to be wearing on him. I scrapped my original paragraph and starting writing it more emotionally, and I learned a lot about Six. I went back and added in the bit about Six seeing himself in the mirror, and the whole thing ended up being a really nice set-piece in which we all learn more about Six. (The fact that it was episode six I actually didn’t notice until the final draft — also a cool touch.)

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