The Whitechapel Project

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