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.

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Episode 14 was both the easiest and hardest episode of Whitechapel I’ve written thus far.

It was easy because, in many ways, it’s an episode I’ve had in mind in some form for months. Even the voting went the way I was hoping (for the first time ever, I might add), so it was great that I didn’t need to think about it or do any planning or try to make it all hold together — I could dive right in and really go to town on a scene I’ve been looking forward to.

It was hard because I made myself incredibly uncomfortable writing it. I’m not sure it’s the scariest or goriest stuff I’ve written, but it’s certainly the most intimate.

I’ve always had a bad relationship with death, because a lot of people in my life have died suddenly and tragically. Some of my first memories are of a cousin of mine who died one night in her sleep. I dumped my step-father’s ashes into Lake Erie after a prolonged fight with cancer. I just buried my grandmom earlier this year, and a friend just died earlier this week. I won’t go so far as to say that death has dogged my every step, but I’m certainly no stranger to it, and it’s been a part of my life more in the past six months than it has ever before in my life.

Maybe that’s the reason why I write horror and crime drama, so that I can try to come to terms with it. Some people block it, some drink, and some just obsess about it for weeks and weeks. I put all that grief and pain and anguish into stories about horrible people doing horrible things. (And I drink.) I think it’s a balance that a lot of horror writers have to come to terms with, that darkness within that they have to tap and spin onto the page. If it works well, you can tell an amazing story, even if you end up with a few sleepless nights as a result. But hey, if I’m going to lose sleep to my inner demons anyhow, might as well entertain some people along the way.

I was still uncomfortable when it came time to record. Rather than shy away from it, I tried to throw myself into the performance, and for the first time I did the whole episode in nearly one take. I recorded and had it edited and up in record time.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on both the writing and the performance, which I greatly appreciate — thank you for the support.

It helps me to come to terms with my own demons.

I realized going into this episode that the setup was similar to earlier episodes — a mysterious figure leading Six into a car and driving him around, and having some connection to one of Six’s memories from episode one — so I tried to play with the formula a bit. Since the voting was so overwhelmingly against her being involved in some sort of trap, I not only turned the black van into a red herring, but I also dropped another piece of information I had been holding on to: Mister Rich’s real name, and the organization he works for. Of course, I’m setting up that Liz and Mister Rich are going to be at odds in how they interact with Six.

The car wash thing was something I’ve had in mind for a couple of episodes, once I realized that Six was bugged (or at least, is told he’s bugged). There are times when I can’t even get cell reception in a car wash, and I certainly can barely hear anything in some of them, so it seemed a plausible (if really odd) location.

At one point, I was going to make Liz European. While Michelle can do a decent variety of European accents, they weren’t working for me, so I told her to revert to her normal accent. I had a brief joke about pants/underwear lined up that I had to cut, but the change in accent still works with a few options I had in mind.

The choices at the end of the episode seem a bit random, but I have a few ideas on what will happen next based on them. To take the one that won’t get voted in by the end of the night as an example, if she had gone back to the hotel she would just be in town for a few days, and that would have set up the next encounter. And there will likely be some form of bad encounter soon — Six has been having it easy the past couple of episodes.

Not to be outdone, Super Agent of Whitechapel Matt Timm has also started a Whitechapel translation project — this time, into Spanish! If you’ve been looking for your favorite amnesiac psychic killer en espanol, add this baby to your RSS feed:

http://proyectowhitechapel.blogspot.com/

“The Cell” is also already translated and posted:

http://proyectowhitechapel.blogspot.com/2010/01/episodio-01-la-celda.html

I hate to do this again, but I’ve been sick the past few days. I have a draft of episode eleven done, but the past couple of days I just haven’t had the energy or cohesion to focus on an edit pass, nor am I in any good condition to record. So I’m going to try to get it edited, recorded, and up on Friday or Saturday, which will leave a shorter voting period (but since it seems many of the votes come in on the last few days anyhow, I don’t think this’ll be a big blow).

I know this is the second episode in a row that’s been delayed. I don’t anticipate this becoming a habit — it’s just a weird set of circumstances that’s been hitting me a bit hard recently.

Agent of Whitechapel Alex Cochrane — who I mercilessly murdered in Episode 7 — has started translating all of the Whitechapel episodes in French! I’ll post links to each French version at the bottom of the English episodes, but you can follow along at the blog here:

Projet: Whitechapel

Épisode 01 – La cellule

Quick note before I dive in: yes, there isn’t any post-mortem for episode 8. I was hella busy that week preparing for a LARP event, and I thought I could catch up on that during the Q&A that got canceled. If someone really has a question about the writing process for episode 8, I’ll answer it in the comments, but otherwise I’ll just dive into episode 9 and move forward.

Author’s Commentary

Because of the previously-mentioned LARP event, I only did a couple hundred words on Saturday, and really didn’t have a chance to write a full draft at all until Sunday night. Worse, I really had no idea what was going to happen (aside from laying the tracks to the next plot point). To top it all off, I had a tie vote in the poll. So I did a lot of hasty and heavy writing and rewriting on really short notice. And yet, I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Such is the creative process.

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After lots of intense negotiations (okay, after I asked nicely), Rob Justice of the BearSwarm podcast has agreed to host a question and answer podcast with me about Act I of Whitechapel! If you have questions about the story, the writing process, the podcast production, or even just personal questions about me, you can email Rob at whitechapel@bearswarm.com over the course of the next week, and he’ll pepper me with them while I try to answer them with some sort of logic and sanity. We’ll record sometime next week, and it’ll be posted both here and on the BearSwarm podcast sometime in early December.

Looking forward to answering your questions!

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.

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A few quick things that Whitechapel readers might be interested in.

• Shadow Freak is the sorry bastard lucky winner of the Agent Mission contest. He (or someone with his name, at least) will be dying in a future episode of Whitechapel. Congrats, Freak!
• I recorded a short Whitechapel promotional piece for The Podge Cast, episode 60. It’s intentionally done in a slightly raw style (similar to my White Wolf Blogcast), but it’s around fifty-eight and a half minutes into the episode, if you’re interested. It was fun and easy to do, so I might send them more “hodges” in future. Many thanks to David Pinilla and the rest for letting me babble a bit about my baby!
• Finally, I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. However, I’m not entirely sure which novel I’m going to write. If you want to help me out, you can sneak over to my LiveJournal and vote on any options you like.

As a reminder, voting will be two weeks long for Episode 5, so get some friends to come over and vote on which questions Six should ask!