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.

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