The Whitechapel Project

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