The Whitechapel Project

For those who have followed my Twitter and LiveJournal for the past few weeks, I’ve made a few cryptic remarks about an upcoming fiction project (which, by the way, is totally unrelated to my work at my day job with CCP/White Wolf Publishing). After a while, I dropped the name “Whitechapel.” After weeks of messing around with a variety of things and seeing what works and what doesn’t, I’m now at the point where I can make a formal announcement about what the hell I’ve been working on.

Whitechapel is an interactive serialized horror novella published both in text and as an audio podcast (read by me, the author). It’ll be primarily hosted on this website (whitechapelproject.com), but I have a lot of avenues to get it in front of your eyes and into your ears as time goes on. Every two weeks, a new episode will be released, which will end with a plot point unresolved and a poll in which readers can vote on how they want the story to proceed. After a week of voting, the most popular option is used to help write the next episode.

The first episode is written, and I’m hoping to have it recorded in time for release on Wednesday, August 5th, but that’s just a hopeful target, not a firm release date.

I tried to predict a lot of potential questions, which I’ve placed below the cut. There will also be an evolving FAQ on the main site.

Where can I vote?

At this time, you can only vote directly on the polls at whitechapelproject.com. I want all the votes to show up in one place, not only for my ease of reference, but also so other readers can accurately see how the voting is going at any particular time. You don’t need to be a member of the site to vote.

How often can I vote?

Once. The site has some rudimentary safeguards to stop casual and accidental submission of multiple votes, but through intentional misdirection or unintentional error it’s possible to vote multiple times. If it’s a mistake, don’t worry about it. If you’re intentionally trying to flood the voting, then I hope you enjoy your petty accomplishment. I’m sure your mother is so proud of you.

Are the votes meaningful to the story?

The short answer is “yes.” Although I do have a vague plot structure (just in order to keep this story from going on and on without any focus), a lot of the plot will depend on the voting. That isn’t to say that votes will always be obviously meaningful – sometimes a fairly trivial choice will have larger repercussions, either through a string of associated elements in my mind as I write, or as part of the plot at some point in the future.

Plus, sometimes I’ll skip over the obvious plot choice to offer a different one. Sometimes its a pacing issue — I have some rough targets each episode that I’ll want to hit, and once in a while the episode might end up being too short or too long if I go with the obvious choice. That doesn’t mean that the choice readers will have won’t be meaningful, but it does mean that sometimes it won’t be the more expected one.

So I’ll try to make the choices important, but they won’t always be explicit and won’t always be the expected ones.

How long will Whitechapel run?

I’m going to try for a run of 24 episodes, possibly breaking down into three eight-episode acts. Due to the nature of the project, the story will almost certainly deviate from my intentions, but I’d like to wrap it up after a year.

What’s up with the audio readings/podcast?

I’ve been a fan of podcast audio fiction for a couple of years now, and I’ve always wanted to try my hand at it. I’ve been doing a podcast for White Wolf Publishing for a while now, and I thought it was time to do one for fiction. Further, not everyone has time to read a story online, but they can listen to short episodes of audio fiction much more easily. Finally, the idea of interactive audio fiction has been in my head for over a decade, and this was one way to scratch that itch. So, I decided to marry the written fiction with audiobook-style readings. I may do some Q&A episodes in the podcast, since it’s much easier to answer questions verbally than to write them out, but everything else will be mirrored in text on the site.

Where else can I experience Whitechapel?

Because I want as many people to read Whitechapel as I can, there are a number of ways you can follow along with Whitechapel and other Whitechapel Project stories besides just reading this site.

• You can read it via RSS feed or Atom feed to a feed aggragator such as Google Reader.
• You can read it on my personal blog, where most entries will be crossposted (episodes will be posted under the “whitechapel” tag).
• You can read it on the syndication feed on LiveJournal.
• You can listen to individual episodes on MP3 from each entry.
• You can listen to the podcast feed using a podcatcher.
• You can also use Feedburner to subscribe (which gives you another group of subscription options).
• You can listen to the podcast with your iTunes software or your Zune software.
• You can keep up to date with the Whitechapel Project on my Twitter feed (or searching on the #whitechapelproject tag).
• You can keep up to date on the Whitechapel Project Facebook fan page.