The Whitechapel Project

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I’ve been going through some of my old pieces, and I decided to post this flash fiction piece to give a taste of (unrelated) horror.

“Questions” is an older microfiction piece of mine, and it’s been through a number of revisions (including one version that made it onto the “Pseudopod” podcast). I also used a different version as a test script for my audio work on the Collection of Horrors for White Wolf Publishing. But all in all, I’ve never been satisfied with it. Today I had a frank talk with my eternal editrix and beta reader Genevieve Podleski, and I hammered out a final version. I’m probably still not going to be entirely happy with it, but I’m finally done fucking with it. (Until I change my mind, of course.)

This piece actually has a few similarities to Whitechapel. Both are first person perspective (I tend to be about fifty/fifty on first and third-person pieces), both are horror, and both came about from online input — “Questions” was written from a post where I collected words and phrases from my readers. While I think my style has matured since I wrote this, there’s enough similarities that it works as a nice aperitif. I’m not intending this piece to have anything to do with the story in Whitechapel, but it’s entirely possible that Claude could come into the story at some point. We’ll have to see how the voting goes.

First, a quick Whitechapel update. Episode 1 is written, and I have some final revisions in mind before I record it. I still have to work a little on my reading speed (which is why I gave myself more time — I’m anticipating quite a number of takes the first time through), but overall things are looking good for the August 5th release.

I did want to take a moment to point out that the Whitechapel Project site is, in fact, more than just the Whitechapel novella (although I anticipate it will likely be the majority of the site’s focus — hence the name). I had been considering a blog for my fiction for quite some time, but it wasn’t until Whitechapel that I had a project big enough to warrant the initial start-up work¹. But I always expected that other fiction would cluster around this site — in fact, if you check out the “About the Project” page, I’ve already got a couple of other projects in mind.

What I didn’t expect is that I would start getting more ideas right away.

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