The Whitechapel Project

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.)

Continue reading

Thanks to everyone for being patient with the extra week. If you’ve been interested in what’s being going on with my health, you can check out the “health”-tagged entries on my LiveJournal. Otherwise, let’s dive into this.

Author’s Commentary

This episode poured out pretty easily. I had envisioned Mr. Rich acting in some advisory capacity to Six back before I started episode four, and this was a case where the voting just bore out where I was inclined to go anyway. I tried to keep this episode from being a bunch of exposition, but the inherent distrust between the two characters made that pretty easy — so easy, in fact, that I actually never really got to the exposition at all.

This actually ended up working in my favor, because I got to try something I’ve been wanting to do since I saw it on some other serial fiction sites — a poll with multiple options. Selecting what questions to ask Mr. Rich seemed like a natural use of that.

Continue reading

Author’s Commentary

Over the past few episodes, I had fallen into a rhythm with writing episodes of Whitechapel: post-mortem on Wednesday (which, after last episode’s close voting, I’m going to probably bump to Thursdays to let the poll close before I comment), first 1000 words on Thursday, revision and last 500-1000 words on Friday, let it sit for two days to think over, and final revision on Monday before recording on Tuesday.

Continue reading

Author’s Commentary

I wasn’t entirely sure how this episode was going to turn out, to be honest. When the vote was firmly cast for bluffing, I had to think about how he could actually do that in a plausible way. I did have a note that VI had the potential for changing his appearance, but I didn’t expect to have to trot it out so soon. Plus, I do have a firm vision for VI’s powers and how they work (in case you haven’t noticed, they all have intentionally violent overtones), so I had to make that all hang together while also being internally consistant. It was a lot to juggle.

Continue reading

As a side note, about half-way through the voting I heard a couple of concerns that the IP and cookie tracking I had implemented made it hard for businesses and multi-reader households to vote separately. So, I changed it to just cookie tracking, so multiple computers on the same IP can vote. This means that some of you might have had the chance to vote multiple times. If so… eh, I’m cool. If people are so passionate that they check back and vote as often as I can, I’m totally okay with it. I just don’t want people writing vote-bots or spamming the polls.

Continue reading

After each episode’s voting closes, I plan to do a “post-mortem” post. This will be a combination of author’s notes on the episode (kind of like DVD commentary) and my thoughts on the voting and discussion of the previous episode.

Author’s Commentary

I’ve had the idea for the opening scene of Whitechapel for years now. At one point it was a set-up for a game of GURPS The Prisoner, then it was a set-up for a whole new role-playing game, then a one-shot LARP, then a novel, then a comic book, then back to a LARP (which almost happened for ICC 2008), then a few other things that came and went so fast that I don’t even remember. I never found the perfect use for it, but the idea of an amnesiac with a de-humanizing plastic armband in a padded cell was always in the back of my head, scratching at me.

Continue reading