The Whitechapel Project

This is a very bittersweet post to write, so forgive me if I ramble a bit.

A couple of months ago, things got busy for me — generally a good busy, but still busy. I figured it was just a bit of a rough patch, so I decided to work through it. I moved some things around with Whitechapel and made it work. No problem — it happens.

Then I got out of that patch of busy into a completely different patch of busy. It was tough, but I decided to put some things on hold until I got through it. Again, I expected it was just a tough spot.

After that, I had a run of computer problems. Okay, that was actually a bad patch. But, chin up, we’ll get through it. I was able to actually get the Q&A episode out, and I figure it would all work out.

Over the past few days, I’ve been asked to take on some additional work responsibilities. It’s an exciting opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to it. However, it does mean that my schedule needs to be a little more flexible, because the days of working weird hours are probably going to continue. Essentially, I’m at a place where I have rebalance my ratio between work and life. So, I had to sit down and think about what things in my life I can reshuffle to make it all work.

Sadly, Whitechapel has to go.

It’s been an amazing run, but the truth of the matter is that my life has changed quite a lot in the past year. I can’t plan around having a run of five days every two weeks in which to write, edit, record, and edit Whitechapel anymore. I can’t even be sure that I can handle just the writing and editing. I’m sure that I’ll be able to get my work/life balance back on track at some point, but I don’t know how long that will take.

So, what’s going to happen to Whitechapel? Honestly, I don’t know. I might sit down and rewrite these episodes, finish it up, and polish it into a novel manuscript at some point. I doubt nothing will ever happen with it, though. It might be weeks, month, or years, but I expect Whitechapel will live again at some point.

Understand that this wasn’t an easy decision to make. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and reexamining for a while, and thinking about very seriously for the past several days. This is just one of a number of overall changes in my life. It’s bittersweet, because I wanted to finish this, and I enjoyed working on it, but the reason why it’s happening is for a lot of really awesome reasons for me personally. There’s just too much good stuff going on for me to be able to give due attention to all of them.

But I do want to take a moment to thank you, my audience. If it wasn’t for you, I probably would have gotten frustrated and dropped this long ago. It’s because of you that this crazy idea that sat in the back of my head became something real. It didn’t go the distance that I hoped for, but it went a hell of a lot further than I could have anticipated because of your support and encouragement. You gave me some constructive criticism, but I never heard a negative word about Whitechapel, which is very rare for an Internet project. You guys have been, and continue to be, amazing.

Thank you.

So, last week I recorded the Q&A episode with Rob Justice of the BearSwarm podcast. I had fully intended to edit it today and post it, and start writing Whitechapel this week.

Last night, the main laptop I use for work and recording started displaying problems with the power cord and battery. I spent all of last night getting everything onto my netbook. It was irritating, but not a huge deal, because the netbook was powerful enough to handle it all (even if it was a touch slow here and there).

A couple of hours ago, I found out that there’s a huge crack on my screen. I have no idea how it got there, but nearly a quarter of my screen is now gone. I talked it over with my family, and we decided that I needed to get a new laptop. That done, I opened up the netbook to see if I could get my files off of it and start the process.

In booting it up, the netbook now refuses to accept that my copy of Windows 7 is genuine (even though I paid for it separately from the computer). I’m not sure how long that will last, but it’s possible that my netbook might just stop working at any point.

So I have no idea what’s going to happen, but things have gone from “slightly irritating” to “trying to find solutions to mission critical work.” I had gotten things mostly caught up in my life, and then this happened, which means that I’m going to be falling behind again while I wait for the new computer to show up and then get it back to the shape I need it in (the usual dance of transferring files and installing new software). At this point, that’ll probably be early to mid June.

I’m going to try and see if I can get at least some stuff onto my wife’s old Mac Air so I can not fall too far behind, but I have no idea how well that’s going to work. I can probably get the writing done, and I might be able to get the recording done through GarageBand, but I can’t guarantee anything.

It sucks that I have to do this yet again, but I have a ton of paying work I have to deal with after my vacation, and that has to take priority over non-paying writing like Whitechapel. I hope I’ll have things on track in a few days, but rather than giving another deadline and then blowing it, I’m going to just say that Whitechapel is going to be on hold for a bit while I get caught up on everything.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve had a nasty sinus infection for a week and a half now. It’s slowly getting better, but I’m still struggling with symptoms (at the moment, it’s a runny nose and difficulty in hearing). Further, I’m in the process of packing my house to move near the end of April, and I have to catch up on the work I missed during all of this, while juggling a company-wide trip to Mexico at the end of April. And, of course, it’s at this point in the narrative where I’ll have to start juggling guest voices again, making the recording of the podcast more challenging. (And all while I have to release on certain dates coming up to account for a side project.) So, in order to make it all work, I’m going to give myself two weeks to write episodes 16 and 17, and hope that it gets me back on track.

At this moment, episode 16 will be on Wednesday, April 7th and episode 17 will be on Tuesday, April 27th. As always, keep an eye on your RSS feed, Twitter, or however you get your Whitechapel news.

Due to today being a company holiday (and thus, a reason for me to spend several hours drinking with my coworkers), I’ll be recording and posting the next episode of Whitechapel tomorrow.

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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I hate to do this again, but I’ve been sick the past few days. I have a draft of episode eleven done, but the past couple of days I just haven’t had the energy or cohesion to focus on an edit pass, nor am I in any good condition to record. So I’m going to try to get it edited, recorded, and up on Friday or Saturday, which will leave a shorter voting period (but since it seems many of the votes come in on the last few days anyhow, I don’t think this’ll be a big blow).

I know this is the second episode in a row that’s been delayed. I don’t anticipate this becoming a habit — it’s just a weird set of circumstances that’s been hitting me a bit hard recently.

Due to work and the holidays, this evening is the first chance I’ve had to sit and even think about Whitechapel, and I’m not likely to get much more time until around Christmas. My options are to try and crank out a shitty episode, or push it back a week, and I’d rather do it right. So, in order to keep my life somewhat sane, I’m going to push back episode 10 to next Wednesday, December 30th.

We only got one question for the Act I Q&A, so Rob and I decided that we’re going to cancel this and shoot for a Q&A at the end of the entire story, rather than an act-by-act breakdown. I may do an act post-mortem, but since I do a breakdown of each episode anyhow, I’m not sure what else I could say that’s new, so I’ll probably just save it all for an overall retrospective.

Hey, not all my ideas are good ones.

A few quick things that Whitechapel readers might be interested in.

• Shadow Freak is the sorry bastard lucky winner of the Agent Mission contest. He (or someone with his name, at least) will be dying in a future episode of Whitechapel. Congrats, Freak!
• I recorded a short Whitechapel promotional piece for The Podge Cast, episode 60. It’s intentionally done in a slightly raw style (similar to my White Wolf Blogcast), but it’s around fifty-eight and a half minutes into the episode, if you’re interested. It was fun and easy to do, so I might send them more “hodges” in future. Many thanks to David Pinilla and the rest for letting me babble a bit about my baby!
• Finally, I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. However, I’m not entirely sure which novel I’m going to write. If you want to help me out, you can sneak over to my LiveJournal and vote on any options you like.

As a reminder, voting will be two weeks long for Episode 5, so get some friends to come over and vote on which questions Six should ask!