The Whitechapel Project

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