The Whitechapel Project

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.