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.

In the past when I’ve wanted to separate these processes, I needed to change the interface. For a while, I would hand-write the first draft, and the process of entering it into my computer would allow me to revise, and thus comprised the second draft. I would then print the whole thing out, and hand-edit the third time before doing a final tweak on the fourth pass. This means that I would put each draft through three different media, and each time things jumped out at me that I wouldn’t have seen before.

This method also takes a really, really long time. And more and more, I don’t have that kind of time.

So, I looked for alternatives. Many times I end up doing my hand-written edits and final polish while I’m recording, so that part of the process could stay. However, I really needed the first and second drafts to be digital (for a lot of reasons). A stray comment on Twitter led me to WriteMonkey, a plain text word processor with just enough features to be useful, but not so many as to be distracting. It worked really, really well – although I was able to go back and make major changes on the fly (like when I had to rewrite the opening two or three times), but I wasn’t tempted to do fine revision at the time. And while WM can export to a couple of rich text-ish formats, actually copy and pasting the text into OpenOffice forced me to go over each line to correct the formatting, which led naturally to second draft revisions.

Anyhow, one thing I wanted to do with this episode is to move Six from being reactive to active, and I think it came across. I did debate having Michelle record Six’s dialogue as the pseudo-Liz, but after a lot of debate I decided that Six has previously heard himself when he’s masquerading as someone else – he doesn’t think of himself as changed, but other people are reacting as if he had. So I decided to record in my own voice. I did, however, have a chance to use Brendan Hutt as Zachery McPhearson again, and that was awesome. I’m looking forward to McPhearson’s increased role in the story.

I’ve had mixed feelings about Timm in this episode. Timm is really just another one of the black coats that have shown up before, but some have pointed out that he could have been the same person through the course of the story. And that would actually have been really smart of me to do. I think in the rewrite I will make Timm (or whatever name I give him) a more direct presence in the story, humanizing the forces hunting Six/Jack down throughout the story. At this stage, though, it’s too late to retroactively create that, so I’ll just confess that it wasn’t planned that way, and note that as a good idea if and when I revise everything.

Interestingly, there were a few people who are keen to see Jack show back up. It seems he’s become a bit of a fan favorite since episode fourteen, which was kind of a surprise to me, and I think that led to the tied voting between following Timm out to the car and just killing him. (Side note: Timm is actually named after Matt Timm, the translator for the Spanish version of Whitechapel.) I debated having a run-off, but I got some feedback from readers over Facebook and Twitter, and it’s still pretty evenly divided. Some suggested I try to merge the options, but they’re pretty mutually exclusive. Still, I’ll give it a try, or I’ll just pick one.

And no, I’m not going to say which I’ve decided on until I post episode seventeen. Because I’m evil that way.

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.

Author’s Commentary

This episode was written to work around a problem that didn’t exist.

Specifically, I knew that the woman featured in this episode was likely to stick around for more than an episode, and I had planned for a while that my wife Michelle would end up voicing that character in my podcast. I also knew that she was going to be out of the country for a week, but I had cleverly planned to write and produce this episode before she left.

And then I delayed everything by a week because of the holidays. Crap. And the voting was pretty clearly slanting toward a mystery woman showing up.

So, after a couple of false starts, I decided to make this into a strength. There’s a reason why this woman isn’t speaking, and it’s relevant to the next episode or two. Considering I was ill during the time I was writing this, I was pretty pleased at my clever solution to the problem.

And then I ended up being so ill that I couldn’t record the episode right away. By the time I was ready to record, Michelle was back home, but by that point I would have had to rewrite the entire episode from scratch.

The upside of going to a last-minute funeral was that I got to spend a few hours in Cincinnati again in the winter. We ended up driving by some of the locations already mentioned in Whitechapel, and I got reminded how fucking cold Ohio can get in the winter. I’m sure this will help me in future episodes.

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.

Author’s Commentary

I’ve planned to have Jack the Ripper involved in this story in some way from the very beginning. While I’ve left lots of elements about the plot open, I did know at some point that Six would learn that he is tied in some way to Jack the Ripper. I do have some ideas on how that would play out, but like with all things with Whitechapel, how it ends up working out is up in the air.

When I offered up the names that Six was called, it actually informed what character would impact this episode on some level. I honestly figured most people wouldn’t pick up on “Druitt” since it wasn’t mentioned in any way on the site (“McPhearson,” for example, was tagged in episode nine), but a few readers picked up the reference pretty quickly. In a very cool move, they kept things to themselves as much as possible, but when I saw that Druitt was chosen, I knew I had to have Jack involved in the episode.

And I admit, I had absolutely no idea how I would do that. That’s part of the reason why I delayed a week — I knew this episode needed me to think about it a bit more than most, and I just wasn’t giving it the time it needed over the holiday.

I actually debated not spilling the beans this episode, because for some reason I had it in my head that the revelation of Six being involved with Jack the Ripper was part of the big reveal. As I thought about it, though, I kept looking back at my roadmap for the story, and this is the point where things get even worse for Six. And what can be worse than thinking you’re the most notorious serial killer in history? So, Six finding out about Jack isn’t really the end of the story, but the part where it gets worse. What he does with the knowledge — that’s the story.

I also confess that this was the one I was most nervous about. I was afraid that it would be too over-the-top, too corny. From the commentary I’ve gotten on the board and the email I’ve received, it seems like I hit the balance well — people who saw it coming a bit didn’t quite see that coming, people who didn’t see it coming were totally floored, and I think folks get that the mystery of Six isn’t resolved yet — not by a long shot.

Voting and Discussion

Voting and discussion was pretty subdued this time, but I’m not surprised — I did just drop a big bomb in people’s laps. There was just no contest in the voting — people love the trope of the mysterious woman walking into the hero’s life. Whether it’s the mysterious “Elizabeth” or not is something I’ll decide on in the next few days. :)

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.

When I decided to make the scene in the cell a flashback, I started with a copy-and-paste of the first few paragraphs and intentionally started building around that language. As I kept writing, though, I found that the structure of the episode as a whole had resonances with the first act, so I rewrote to play those up more. It might be a pointless bit of stylistic nonsense, but it amused me, and got me writing on an episode that almost didn’t happen.

Elizabeth and the man in the cell are both characters I planned to introduce in the early planning stages of this story, and it was nice to start that process.

On the recording, I had two guest voices, and both were remote. The process worked better than I feared, but not as good as I hoped. Still, live and learn. I’m also looking forward to seeing how Brenden Whiny-Butt Brendan handles the man in the cell in future episodes.

Voting and Discussion

On the name poll, I did have four different options on how it would go based on the name (another originally unintentional homage to episode 1). I am pleased that some people caught the subtle reference to “Mr. Druitt,” but now I have to do something with it. Thanks, guys. :)

Back to episode nine

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.

Beyond that, this was really an episode that was originally all about getting from point A to point B, and then seeing what mess I left myself to clean up. Since not one person voted with the cops, I decided to make them evil police, so even stuff you don’t vote for might inspire me. But I knew this was leading up to the end of Act I (which, by all accounts, looks like it will end on schedule with episode eight), so I had to get something going to lead to roughly where things had to go. This is making things a bit more fast-paced than I originally envisioned, but thus far y’all seem to be enjoying it, so I must be doing something right!

Yes, “ZM Lacuna” means something. But that’s for Act II. And I’ll have a surprise for you between Act I and Act II next week.

Voting and Discussion

One thing I learned — talking about this on Twitter directly relates to voting. I got 30 votes after I started mentioning it on Twitter and Facebook, and a number of people said “Oh, I forgot to vote — thanks for the reminder!” I had known that social media was helping, but this was good to express to me that people prefer the reminders, instead of finding them irritating.

Anyhow, even though I had six options, it quickly centered around taking Mister Rich’s car, so the choice really became whether to take Mister Rich with Six or leave him there. Interestingly, there was some strong movement toward “hide in the woods” in the comments, but it only garnered 12% in the poll. I think that’s the first time that a strong opinion in the comments had a poor showing in the poll, which was interesting to see.

Someone wanted to know when I would be pitching Whitechapel as a TV series. I was sincerely surprised by the idea, but I will admit that a lot of my inspiration comes from British dramas, and I could probably repackage Whitechapel into six one-hour episodes if I ever wanted to go that route. I just didn’t realize any of that until it was pointed out to me.

Back to episode seven

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.)

The other weird part was trying to keep the whole episode from being an info-dump. I added a lot more action to the exchange between Mister Rich and Six, and tried to humanize Mister Rich a bit more, but I admit I wasn’t sure how well I pulled that off.

One of the harder parts of writing fiction this way is to keep the small details right. The first time, I completely forgot that it was winter, so I added the snow references in to keep reminding myself that, hey, it’s fucking winter in Ohio, moron. I also noticed after I published this that Six hasn’t slept yet, and it’s probably pretty late into the night. Likely he nodded off in the shower.

The episode recording went about the same as last time — I thought I had a faster way to edit, but it turns out I was wrong. Well, there was the fact that I had to completely record the episode over again because Audacity crashed and took my recording with it. Irritating. I think I want to try a different configuration of the microphone to get a different audio quality to my reading, but we’ll see.

Voting and Discussion

I didn’t have as much chance to promote and ride herd on the voting and discussion this time, but it was pretty clear that folks want to stick with Mister Rich for a while yet (although there’s very different opinions on how the Six/Mister Rich relationship will evolve over time). Interestingly, while I think some readers noted the possible utility of working with the police, not one person voted for that option. Ah well. Fuck the police.

Also, the best comment ever was posted last episode.

Back to episode six

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.

One thing I learned after I posted the episode was that my brain naturally goes to past tense when writing dialogue, and it’s so insidious that I don’t even notice it after several editing passes. I had to do some post-episode tense clean-up, which actually didn’t make it into the recorded episode. Now that I know to look for it, I hope it won’t be an issue in future. Still, it was weird to distinctly remember changing something only to find out that it not only wasn’t changed, but I actually said it incorrectly as well. Frustrating.

Recording actually went a little easier — although there were three times as many lines for Mr. Rich this time around, I found a system that allowed me to insert the lines much more easily. It’s still time-intensive — it takes most of an evening for me to record and edit an episode — but I’m getting better at recording more technically complicated episodes without adding too much more time to my workload.

Voting and Discussion

Voting was pretty light this week — only 29 votes — although people were shocked that they got the chance to vote more than once. Two questions jumped out into the lead pretty early, and stayed there: “Why did you call me Six?” and “If you know me, why don’t you trust me?” No one apparently had any question (or care) about what happened to Dr. Tucci — that question didn’t get a single vote.

This is actually a cool result for me, because these are two questions I fleshed out way back when I was doing the prep work for episode four, so it’ll be nice to have a chance to play with that information some more. I’m still hoping to add more questions to Six’s situation than I answer in episode six, though — we’re still in Act I, more or less, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet.

Back to episode five

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.

This time, Thursday was right out, and most of Friday was out too. I had a little time to jot some ideas in my notebook, but as I started putting things together, I realized that I needed to actually determine some of the story’s back history (at least enough so that I could move forward). I took some initial notes, but I spent Saturday sketching it all out. Sunday I plowed through an entire first draft, and Monday I spent revising it. Tuesday I was ill and just not in the right frame of mind to record, so I did it on Wednesday.

Of course, very little of the material I came up with on Saturday actually ended up in the episode, but at least it helped me to think about this upcoming episode, so it wasn’t wasted. Just hectic.

To top it all off, I had planned to introduce a guest voice into the podcast this episode — the mysterious driver, played by David Bounds. We actually came up with a good system: he records his lines in Garageband on his laptop, each as a separate file, and then uploads them to our shared drive. I import each file and line it up with the appropriate part of my reading. It took a little longer to produce, but he really nailed the sound I wanted for that character better than I could have, so it was totally worth it. And based on the voting, this character will be around for at least another episode.

As for the writing, it was pretty straightforward once I had a plan. I knew this was going to be a slower piece after three episodes of “get VI the hell out of the Whitechapel Project.” It was pretty easy to change the mystery focus from VI’s amnesia and surroundings to that of the car and the driver, so I played with that some this time.

The scene with the fast food originally came about because the episode seemed a bit rushed and needed something to stretch it out, but it ended up accentuating the core conflict of the episode (“who is the driver?”), so I was very pleased with it.

A quick note of thanks to my wife, Michelle, for helping me out on what happens to people when they lose their skin. I had to pause when writing that scene because I disturbed myself with the imagery. I also had to rewrite it a fair bit, because the first draft was kind of wimpy, and I really wanted to sell the grossness of the situation.

Voting and Discussion

The choice actually took me a while to word, because I wanted to be honest, but not too honest. Specifically “try to incapacitate or kill my assailant” had an emphasis on try. As one of the readers pointed out (I think it was Rob Justice), not everything VI tries necessarily has to succeed, and this was the first time that I put out an option that was probably doomed to failure. I debated for a while on it, but I was confident that the story would definitely have taken a different turn if he tried (and failed) to attack the driver then if he had tried to talk his way out of it.

Also, wow. The number of votes went from 37 to 46, tying the number of votes from episode one. Next week, let’s see if we can go for 50!

The voting itself was pretty much the inverse of last episode — it started off very, very close at the start (even holding a three-way tie for most of a day) before one option slowly but steadily pulled into the lead. So, next episode VI will be dropping his Tucci disguise and telling the driver the truth about what’s going on.

The discussion was more subdued this time, but most people seemed to like the twist of the (circumstantial so far) consequences of VI’s ability to disguise himself, which I’m very pleased by. Given that this episode was mostly tension with a bit of violence at the end, I’m not too surprised that the chatter was a bit lower this week.

Back to Episode Four

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.

It took about three drafts, but early on I was inspired by the “wearing Tucci’s skin” idea. Originally it was just a flavorful way to talk about the illusion of being someone else, but it really worked well with the feel of his powers so far, so I kept that, and I actually have some ideas on where that will end up.

The line about what happens when VI starts killing was a sudden inspiration, and I have no idea where it’s going to go at this point, but damn it was cool.

I wasn’t sure until the chapter break where the Whitechapel Project was located. I even debated changing it before the recording, because it could have just as easily been in London, England. At the 11th hour, though, I decided to stick with Ohio for a couple of reasons. First, I’m from Ohio, so that means I have a lot more material to draw from when things go in a direction I didn’t expect. Secondly, similar to my post-mortem last episode, the recordings are going to primarily be in American English, so keeping the story within the United States means less disconnect from the podcast.

I did know from episode one that one of the visions related to a car. It seemed a good place to tie back to that vision. Also, I needed something to happen to force a decision point.

The recording was a bit weak for my tastes — I was trying to record around a sick cat and a very barky dog, and I was getting frustrated — but it was a (self-imposed) deadline that I had to meet, so I got in there and recorded it. I didn’t stumble as much this time, and the editing went a little easier, but when I listened to snippets of it the next day, I felt it could have been better.

Let’s talk about my outline for a bit. Before I started, I had 24 phrases written down that detail a rough plot progression. Episode 2′s phrase was “Escape,” and yet here I am at episode 3 with the escape still not quite done yet. It might not be until episode 5 before I can get to what I planned for episode 3. It’s more exciting than irritating, honestly — I feel like this story is going to end up with a lot more depth than I originally anticipated.

Also, it was pointed out to me by my wife (who is also a reader and voter) that this is just as much a mystery as a horror story. I admit that VI is a bit of a detective (at least when it comes to finding out his own identity), but I really expected that the mystery elements would be secondary to the action and horror elements. Instead, I’m seeing comments to the effect of “I don’t want to find out the mystery just yet,” which I did not expect.

As a result, I might consider rewriting my rough outline at some point in the future. I think there are some areas that I can move around to make it more mystery-like and follow the current flow more closely. I might be able to get it back to 24 episodes, but I’m not going to force it if it needs more legs.

Voting and Discussion

All I can say is “holy shit.” You guys are awesome.

We did beat the number of votes from last episode, but at the time I’m writing this, three options are all tied for first place — “run for it,” “get in the car,” and “just keep walking.”  I was asked what would happen if two options tied, and I joked about just picking one or flipping a coin, but now with the real possibility of three options all tying, I’m torn. Ideally, I’d like to incorporate as much as I can of all winning options, but most times that’s just not possible (such as in this case). I’m still up in the air about whether I’ll just choose or I’ll determine it randomly — I’m leaning more toward randomly, to keep with the spirit of the voting (i.e., that it’s out of my control).

I was really surprised by the popularity of “just keep walking,” which actually had the lead for much of the time. It ties a bit into some people wanting to preserve the mystery, but there was also a vibe that some readers thought the other options were a little too convenient. Interestingly, I threw that option in as a kind of “non-option,” something that would make for five possible choices but was one I didn’t seriously expect people to choose, and yet there were a lot of really sound and engaging reasons why it was compelling to a number of readers (at least 10 of you).

I’m really excited about how tense and passionate the voting (and the discussion) was this time around. You guys are really inspiring me to push this story in new directions.

Back to episode three

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.

Author’s Commentary

This episode started off as one episode, and ended up becoming quite another.

I’ll be honest — I had a rough idea how this would go when I first started planning Whitechapel, although a lot of the details were solely dependent on the voting from episode one. I knew that he was going to escape into an empty corridor, and that VI would find another office in which there would be some information and supplies. Interestingly, this structure came about because I briefly considered making Whitechapel a text adventure game, and there were some game design reasons why that scene had to happen, but either way the core of the scene was in my head.

The bit with the flashback? Totally out of the blue. I have no idea where it came from, or even entirely what it means (though I get a sense it relates to the flashbacks at the beginning of episode one). I just know that I wanted to work in a bit I learned a long time ago about finding your way out of a maze, which also happened to be the same advice for finding your way out of a building when you can’t see where you’re going.

Dr. Tucci? Fucked if I know. I can’t even say where the last name came from, let alone what role he has to play.

Why Dr. Tucci’s workout clothes are all gray? Not entirely sure, but I have some ideas.

The picture on the wall? I actually have an idea for this, but I found a very similar picture in a random Google image search, and thought it was too cool not to use.

Whitechapel Project? Although it’s the name for the website, it wasn’t actually my original idea for the group that kept VI hostage. I wrote it down as a placeholder, and when I went through to revise, it seemed so natural that I kept it.

VI as an American was just prudence — since I’m recording the podcast in my normal speaking voice (in an American accent), it made sense to make VI American as well. However, finding a way to prove that in the story proved tricky. In an early draft I had VI speaking to himself, but that was hard to explain in the first person (and even harder to read), so I revised it to a written English word. I picked “honor” arbitrarily, but it ended up being a great little bit, so I kept it.

The alarm was part of my plan, but I didn’t know how to push that to a voting point, so that’s when I went with Raymond Chandler‘s advice and brought in a guy with a gun. Well, a guy and the gun are in different rooms, but the theory’s there.

I can certainly say that half of the episode I had pre-planned, but the other half came out from a combination of ideas from the conversation on episode one as well as random bits bouncing around in my head.

The recording was a bit trickier this time. I actually had to rewrite some bits because I had trouble speaking them (like the phrase “silently swings shut,” apparently — I gave up after a dozen tries and just rewrote the bitch), and a few times saying the lines out loud helped me find places where it was redundant or just badly phrased. When I finished recording and started editing, I found that the final few lines were just mysteriously gone from my recording, so I had to re-record those. It was really weird.

Voting and Discussion

Unless 15 people all vote in the next six hours and all vote exactly the same way, it looks like VI will bluff. What’s interesting is the rationale is all over the place — some readers are already emotional invested in VI and don’t want him to be a cold-blooded killer, while others think that VI might not actually be sane right now, so bluffing may help to show how much of his world is real and how much is fantasy. Like last episode, there’s a lot of insightful and diverse commentary on the choices, and it’s really helping me with lots of cool ideas for future episodes. This is an unexpected but really, really, really cool side benefit of the blog.

Voting seems a bit lower than last episode. I’d like to get some more people involved, so hopefully next week I’ll have a little “special mission” to increase reader size. Stay tuned.

Back to episode two

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.

Recently, I had a lengthy conversation with my friends Russell and Joseph (both of White Wolf Vampire fame) about the future of interactive fiction via the Internet. We all agreed that the increase in social networking technology had to have an impact on how people told stories to each other, and we spent a lot of time talking about ideas on how this could happen. This led to an idea I kicked around a few years ago through LiveJournal of writing a story based on reader feedback. A talk with my roommate (David Bounds) about the versatility and ease of using WordPress to do what I wanted got the idea firmly planted in my head, and I decided on Whitechapel as a title. For some reason this title brought back the image in the padded cell, and from there it was just a matter of planning out the logistics.

The podcast element was a lark at first — I’ve been a fan of audiobooks for years (and podcast fiction especially), and I always wanted to do a fiction podcast. Running an audio blog podcast for a few months has just made me realize how easy it was to do. I originally discounted the idea because I was afraid it would take too long to produce each episode, but some initial testing proved that as long as I did a lot of the initial planning before the project launched, it should be just a couple of hours to record, edit, and compile each reading.

There isn’t much to talk about the original episode writing itself — it really all came together from a confluence of things I had been thinking about long before the project actually came into being.

Voting and Discussion

As I mentioned while I was at GenCon, the voting was 54% in favor of “it’s the roman numeral for six,” which was an overwhelming majority of the 46 votes. Interestingly, there was a lot of conversation around the three choices, including a belief that there the other two choices weren’t really choices at all. While I have asserted a couple of times that all choices will be meaningful even if they don’t appear to be, some people pointed out (and validly, I think) that it’s hard to make a choice in a vacuum. While I won’t say that I won’t have any more opaque or blind choices, I will try to do them less often than I originally planned.

However, I did have some strongly different ideas in mind. If, for example, people voted that “VI” were the narrator’s initials, I had planned that the padded room was actually disguised as an exclusive resort for the rich and famous where they can hide away from the public and clean up. Obviously, things would have gone very wrong for Victor Ingham. On the other hand, I had a few, more vague ideas for a case of mistaken identity, which would have revolved around the narrator being accused of a crime he didn’t commit and being the recipient of some new experimental corrective procedure.

As an interesting side note, I had three different people come up to me at GenCon and remark on Whitechapel and tell me they were enjoying it so far. That’s amazing for a serial that’s just on it’s first episode! Thanks to all of you who have promoted it on your Twitter accounts and blogs and podcasts and Facebook accounts — this project is already becoming something amazing as a result of your hard work.

I have some ideas on how to keep this momentum going, but that’s for later. Right now, I have to spend the next few days figuring out how to get “Six” out of the situation he’s in.

Back to episode one

“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.

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.

While my family and I were our running errands this morning, we went into a bookstore (not actually to buy books, interestingly enough). I remarked that it seemed like every day there was another “bad girl gets involved with the supernatural” series on the shelves, and I joked about how White Wolf was doing that long before it was cool². This led to us talking about the tropes of the emerging genre, and me saying that I could probably write something like that easily enough. We laughed about it and continued on our errands.

For the last couple of hours, it’s been poking at the back of my brain, and now I have some ideas for Katrina Night, Vampire Hunter. I’m getting ready to put some stuff down into a Google Doc after I finish this post, so it’s entirely possible that some Katrina Night stuff might show up here on the blog, along with other projects like the adventures of Agent Patriot and Mosaic.

For ease, I’m going to break each series up into its own category, and I’ll try to tag accordingly, so you can choose what you want to follow as well as search more easily for it on the site. If, for example, you really only give a shit about Whitechapel, you can just follow the “Whitechapel” category (for those reading on my LiveJournal, you can also follow the “Whitechapel” tag). I’ll tag rambling posts about my writing process like this one under “Author’s Notes,” news about the site and the project as a whole under “Site News,” and so on. I don’t expect everyone will like everything on here, but I want to make it as easy as possible for many people to follow what they do like.

By the way, everything I put up here is free in cost, but I’m always appreciative of financial donations. I’m not asking for people to drop a massive amount of money on me (though I certainly won’t turn it down!), but I do want people to have the opportunity to buy me a beer after hearing a good story, or at least the Web 2.0 equivalent. If you’d like to donate, feel free to check out the “Buy Me A Beer” link at the top of every page.

Footnote 1. To be fair, David Bounds is responsible for the majority of the technical heavy-lifting. He was able to get my WordPress installation up and running in no time, and even helped the site through a few initial hiccups during testing.

Footnote 2. Sonya Blue, among other titles.