The Whitechapel Project

So, I’m still crazy busy, but episode 16 was pretty quick to write, all told. Part of that is because I tried out a new process.

Previous, I would write every draft of the episode in OpenOffice 3. I would write the first 1000 words the first day, and then the next day I would go back and edit that 1000 words before finishing up the episode. While initially this helped me to get back into the swing of writing, more often than not it meant I would dick around with revision, and just when I was getting into the swing of that, I would have to write again. More and more I’m coming to appreciate that my brain really works in different ways when I’m writing and when I’m editing, so I decided to look into options to help me keep those spaces separate when I’m writing.

In the past when I’ve wanted to separate these processes, I needed to change the interface. For a while, I would hand-write the first draft, and the process of entering it into my computer would allow me to revise, and thus comprised the second draft. I would then print the whole thing out, and hand-edit the third time before doing a final tweak on the fourth pass. This means that I would put each draft through three different media, and each time things jumped out at me that I wouldn’t have seen before.

This method also takes a really, really long time. And more and more, I don’t have that kind of time.

So, I looked for alternatives. Many times I end up doing my hand-written edits and final polish while I’m recording, so that part of the process could stay. However, I really needed the first and second drafts to be digital (for a lot of reasons). A stray comment on Twitter led me to WriteMonkey, a plain text word processor with just enough features to be useful, but not so many as to be distracting. It worked really, really well – although I was able to go back and make major changes on the fly (like when I had to rewrite the opening two or three times), but I wasn’t tempted to do fine revision at the time. And while WM can export to a couple of rich text-ish formats, actually copy and pasting the text into OpenOffice forced me to go over each line to correct the formatting, which led naturally to second draft revisions.

Anyhow, one thing I wanted to do with this episode is to move Six from being reactive to active, and I think it came across. I did debate having Michelle record Six’s dialogue as the pseudo-Liz, but after a lot of debate I decided that Six has previously heard himself when he’s masquerading as someone else – he doesn’t think of himself as changed, but other people are reacting as if he had. So I decided to record in my own voice. I did, however, have a chance to use Brendan Hutt as Zachery McPhearson again, and that was awesome. I’m looking forward to McPhearson’s increased role in the story.

I’ve had mixed feelings about Timm in this episode. Timm is really just another one of the black coats that have shown up before, but some have pointed out that he could have been the same person through the course of the story. And that would actually have been really smart of me to do. I think in the rewrite I will make Timm (or whatever name I give him) a more direct presence in the story, humanizing the forces hunting Six/Jack down throughout the story. At this stage, though, it’s too late to retroactively create that, so I’ll just confess that it wasn’t planned that way, and note that as a good idea if and when I revise everything.

Interestingly, there were a few people who are keen to see Jack show back up. It seems he’s become a bit of a fan favorite since episode fourteen, which was kind of a surprise to me, and I think that led to the tied voting between following Timm out to the car and just killing him. (Side note: Timm is actually named after Matt Timm, the translator for the Spanish version of Whitechapel.) I debated having a run-off, but I got some feedback from readers over Facebook and Twitter, and it’s still pretty evenly divided. Some suggested I try to merge the options, but they’re pretty mutually exclusive. Still, I’ll give it a try, or I’ll just pick one.

And no, I’m not going to say which I’ve decided on until I post episode seventeen. Because I’m evil that way.