Official Blog of Eddy Webb

Send Questions for the Act I Q&A!

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:26:39 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

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!

Episode 08 – The Van

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:18:21 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Listen to this episode

Download this episode in MP3

Previously on Whitechapel

Mister Rich revealed some tantalizing information about Six’s past, although he was wary of Six’s true intentions. After Six had some food, a shower, and some new clothes, Mister Rich was followed by two police officers to the run-down motel that they were staying at. The situation escalated, and Six killed one of the officers with his mind while Mister Rich was wounded in a gunfire exchange with the second officer. Six realized that the cops were fake, but just as he was pulling Mister Rich’s car around to get him to a hospital, a black van showed up at the other end of the motel parking lot.

Episode Eight – The Van

Fuck this. I’ve killed enough tonight – I can’t let someone else die because of my negligence. I lean over Mister Rich and slide my arms under his armpits. I try to pick him up, but his muscular bulk makes it feel like I’m trying to lift a boulder. I switch to his legs to drag him to the car. The fluffy snow helps to slide him along, leaving a red smear on the frozen ground behind him. It’s slow work, and the whole time I look for some kind of super-strength or telekinesis or something that might be lurking inside my brain, but all I get is a bigger headache.

It feels like hours getting Mister Rich to the car, but the van hasn’t moved. A couple of men are standing on either side of the van, wearing thick, black wool coats over button-down shirts, ties and slacks. One is walking toward the pile of meat that used to be Cochrane, and the other is talking into a cell phone while scanning the area.

I realize that how I’ve parked Mister Rich’s car next to the police cruiser effectively hides me and Mister Rich, as long as I stay low. I finish dragging Mister Rich to the car, wincing at every snap of a twig or bounce of Mister Rich’s skull. Once I get him to the open door, I try to fold his upper body up and shove him into the back seat. I’m sure I’m breaking a thousand medical procedures, but he only might die if I get him into the car, instead of certainly dying if he bleeds to death in the snow.

I keep pushing, and Mister Rich finally flops forward with a solid thump. I breathe a sigh of relief, and quietly close the rear door before crouching toward the front door and opening it softly. I grab the keys from my pocket and slide into the driver’s seat.

Mister Rich’s phone rings. I feel a scream rise in my throat out of surprise, but I manage to clamp it down. I look at it to check the ID of the caller, but the screen just says “ZM Lacuna,” same as on the cop’s credit card. Why would the company that issued the credit card that a fake police officer was carrying be calling Mister Rich?

I throw the cell phone on the passenger seat along with the pistols and the clothes, and I settle into the driver’s seat, crouching low. I put the key in the ignition and turn it just far enough to unlock. I ease the car into reverse and take a deep breath. My hand grabs the key, and starts to turn it.

Suddenly, there’s a pounding on my side window. One of the men from the van is pressing his face against the glass, holding his hand next to his eyes in order to see through the window tinting. I can barely make out a muffled “Marsh? Are you in there?”

I briefly consider taking on the disguise of Mister Rich, but the memory of Dr. Tucci’s skinned corpse comes back. No. No more killing.

I crank the key hard and stomp on the gas. The car shoots back as I turn hard on the steering wheel, and I can feel the back wheels start to slide. The man pounding on the window falls back and rolls out of the car’s way as I hit the breaks. I slam the car into drive and hit the gas again. I can hear the tires spinning for a second before the car lunges for the turn out of the parking lot.

My life becomes nothing but a series of turns. Hard left. Try not to swerve into the trees. Hard right. Watch out for the truck. Hard right again. I try not to think about where I’m going – I just pick random turns and focus on keeping my car on the road and going as fast as I can.

Which is probably why I ended up driving past a police car at 110 miles per hour.

I hear the siren kick in behind me. Fuck. I risk a glance in the rearview mirror, and I can see his lights flashing. Behind the cruiser are a pair of large, bright headlights, but it’s too dark to make out who they belong to.

I glance around the dashboard, looking for inspiration. I notice that Mister Rich has a built-in GPS system, and I get an idea. Quickly tapping the screen, I program in a course for the hospital. If I can get to the hospital before I’m pulled over, maybe the police will help me get Mister Rich inside, and the presence of real police might shelter me from the men in the van long enough for me to think of another way to escape.

I listen to the soothing electronic voice giving directions while I try to keep one eye on the slowly scrolling map glowing in the darkness of the car. Merge right. Straight ahead to the highway. Take this exit. Ignore the police officer screaming for me to pull over through his mounted bullhorn. Another three miles. Two miles. My destination is on the right.

The lights move alongside me, and I can see a cop angrily gesturing for me to pull over. I start to shake my head, but realize he can’t see me. The glowing sign for Mercy Anderson Emergency Room jumps out at me, and I yank the wheel hard into the turn. The cop car speeds past, but I notice out of the corner of my eye that it manages to make another turn into the hospital campus.

I park the car in front of the emergency room drive-up and rush inside the automatic doors. “Help, I have a man bleeding in my car outside!” A few people dressed in scrubs rush out with me, one of them bringing a gurney with him. I turn around and head back outside to lead them to the car.

The police are already there, pointing their guns at me. They start to shout orders, but I raise my hands and point to the car. “Wait! A man is bleeding to death inside my car! Let me open the car for the ER team, please.”

The cops pause for a moment, and then one tells me to throw him the keys to the car. I do so, and he picks them up while his partner covers me with her pistol. I tell him to open the front door and look for a button on the dashboard.

He has the door open when I hear a crack, and I feel like someone has kicked me in the side, knocking me over. I try to scramble back up to see what happened, but my body won’t respond. My muscles are stiff, locked rigid. I can hear the cops shouting at someone else, and something about a taser, but out of the corner of my eye I see one of the men in the black wool coats holding a shotgun and showing some kind of card or badge to the police officers.

I feel myself being rolled onto my back, and I look into the eyes of the other wool overcoat. He’s holding a device in his hand that crackles electricity. I feel my jaw loosen a bit, and I manage to ask “Who are you?”

The man looks bored with the question. “We’re your owners. And you’ve been a very bad dog.”

He presses the device to my flesh, and I black out.

Where will I wake up?

Back in my cell?

In a hospital?

Or in a bedroom?

The choice is yours.

Where will I wake up?

Back in my cell

In a hospital

In a bedroom

View Results

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Episode 07 Post-Mortem

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:25:12 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image by killthebird via Flickr

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

Writer's Block: Book review

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:53:55 GMT

What (if any) books would you ban from a high school library? Are there certain subjects that you feel are inappropriate for teenagers regardless of literary merit?

View 1432 Answers

Anything written by Dan Brown. Our children shouldn't be exposed to such terrible writing.

Marvelous Superheroes

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:27:03 GMT

What happens when a game designer gets an itch to play with some house rules and loses complete control over his ideas?

This:

Marvelous Superheroes (Playtest Version 0.1)

From the Introduction:

I have always loved the Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR, and over the years I have often considered it to be a good superhero game for my style of gaming. However, while many of the mechanics have held up as a decent RPG-light system, there are weird sub-rules and needlessly complex systems built into the game that are just too quirky for my tastes nowadays. Meanwhile, I’ve been familiar with Fudge for a decade now and liked the idea of it, but it also had some weirdly complex areas that seemed unnecessary and kept me from really trying out the system. A couple of years back, a public domain game called 4C was released. It was a more streamlined version of my favorite superhero system, but it went in a different direction, focusing more on the numbers than the words which made Marvel Super Heroes so cool to me.

One day, in thinking over some house rules for a new superhero campaign I wanted to run, I considered converting 4C and Fudge into a new game close to Marvel Super Heroes, so I would have more flexibility in terms of rules hacking down the road. I found a great article by Steve Kenson on the “Superlative System,” which was his start on a conversion attempt between Marvel and Fudge, and that started me on the road to what eventually became Marvelous Superheroes.

This document is rewritten from the Fudge and 4C SRD documents for use in my personal games. I do provide a simple conversion page to go from Marvel Super Heroes to Marvelous Superheroes, but it isn’t intended as a challenge to anyone’s intellectual property. Right now, this is just a fun system that I hope will finally hit my sweet spot of superhero gaming.

I stopped poking at it a while ago, but I kept forgetting to post it online. If people want to run some playtests or just read it over, that would be cool.

[Media Whore] Lots of Cool Stuff Edition

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:06:32 GMT

It's been a while since I've done this, and I'm getting ready for a LARP in a few minutes, so let's get to this.

30 Rock: I admit, when I first caught a couple of episodes of this show, I didn't find it all that funny. But we kept hearing lots of good things about the show, so on a lark we started watching season 2 through Netflix Streaming. We got so hooked that we went back and watching the first season, and now we're catching up on the latest season on Hulu. It's a surprisingly entertaining show with a dose of weirdness that keeps it entertaining.
Uncharted 2: I wasn't a big fan of Uncharted, so I wasn't all that excited about Uncharted 2. But David picked it up and started playing it, and one night after getting frustrated with Brutal Legend, I decided to give it a try. The best summary I can give is that this game reminded me of the excitement I had when I first watched the Indiana Jones movies. It's more Indiana Jones than any Indiana Jones game I've played.
Star Guard: On the completely opposite end of graphics quality and price, Star Guard is a free Flash run and gun platformer that just shouldn't be as much fun as it is. The way the story unfolds adds an interesting layer to "green guy kills all the red guys." There's also a checkpoint system and infinite lives, but the corpses of your previous incarnations litter the battlefield as you work through the game.

More as I get a chance.

[Head To Keyboard] 5 things to avoid if you want your submission considered

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:33:00 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

I've been kicking around the idea of doing an irregular column of writing advice called "Head To Keyboard" (or HTK for short), basically talking about things that annoy me about being a writer or an editor. I wasn't sure if it would be part of the blogcast or part of this blog, but more and more my blog is about writing anyhow, so I decided to start doing it here.

After two years of handling the White Wolf slush pile, as well as several more years submitting my work to various publishers, I keep running into five things that people keep doing that doesn't help them one bit in getting published. This isn't secret knowledge, arcane information or even sage advice, but people keep screwing it up over and over and over again, so I thought it's stuff probably worth repeating.

Five Things To Avoid

1. Ignoring submission guidelines. The company you want to write for has them there for a reason. Not only does not following the guidelines automatically irritate the slush pile reader (which won't incline him to regard your submission with any particular sympathy), but there may also be legal aspects that need to be followed before your submission can be considered. Even if you get bored and stop reading this blog now, take this piece of advice with you: follow the damned submission guidelines.

2. Talking shit on the Internet. More and more editors will do a Google search on your name to find out more about you. If they find your forum posts and tweets and blogs about how stupid the editor's company is and what horrible products they produce, you'll get a form rejection. Further, editors do talk to each other, and word gets around. You don't have to be in love with everything that a company produces, but posting it for public view on the Internet won't help your long-term prospects.

3. Having special needs. Love it or hate it, Microsoft Word is the standard -- I have run into few companies that don't assume it as the default format (though RTF is a close second), and never met a company that won't accept it at all. If you want to make money as a writer, get Microsoft Word. If you simply can't, get some software that can convert your documents to Microsoft Word and read Word comments and markup (OpenOffice 3 is good, usable on all three main OS formats, and is free). If you absolutely insist on submitting your magnum opus in Microsoft Works or WordPerfect, I hope you enjoy being rejected unread.

4. Using generic submissions. Take a few minutes before you submit and read up on the company you're submitting to. Get the editor's name right. Specify what product you're submitting for. Make sure the company you're submitting to is even accepting submissions for your kind of manuscript. If you don't care enough about the publisher to get a few details right, odds are they won't care enough to publish you.

5. Plagiarizing your material. Seriously, don't do this. Again, one Google search will find you out. If you need to quote, quote and give credit. But that shit didn't fly in high school, and it won't fly now. And as more and more people read your work, eventually someone's going to notice something odd and out you.

I'm not kidding when I say that simply not doing these five things will get you much further in the slush pile.

Episode 06 Post-Mortem

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:55:06 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image by Firesign via Flickr

Author’s Commentary

This was a weird episode to write in a couple of ways. The first half was really simple, because it was essentially the exposition I expected to get to in episode five, more or less. When that ran out, I also got to address a point that got cut from the last episode — that Six needs a shower.

Once he was in the shower, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I started with him reviewing the information and putting it all together (something I’ve done a lot in previous episodes), but I realized about halfway through that this has got to be wearing on him. I scrapped my original paragraph and starting writing it more emotionally, and I learned a lot about Six. I went back and added in the bit about Six seeing himself in the mirror, and the whole thing ended up being a really nice set-piece in which we all learn more about Six. (The fact that it was episode six I actually didn’t notice until the final draft — also a cool touch.)

The other weird part was trying to keep the whole episode from being an info-dump. I added a lot more action to the exchange between Mister Rich and Six, and tried to humanize Mister Rich a bit more, but I admit I wasn’t sure how well I pulled that off.

One of the harder parts of writing fiction this way is to keep the small details right. The first time, I completely forgot that it was winter, so I added the snow references in to keep reminding myself that, hey, it’s fucking winter in Ohio, moron. I also noticed after I published this that Six hasn’t slept yet, and it’s probably pretty late into the night. Likely he nodded off in the shower.

The episode recording went about the same as last time — I thought I had a faster way to edit, but it turns out I was wrong. Well, there was the fact that I had to completely record the episode over again because Audacity crashed and took my recording with it. Irritating. I think I want to try a different configuration of the microphone to get a different audio quality to my reading, but we’ll see.

Voting and Discussion

I didn’t have as much chance to promote and ride herd on the voting and discussion this time, but it was pretty clear that folks want to stick with Mister Rich for a while yet (although there’s very different opinions on how the Six/Mister Rich relationship will evolve over time). Interestingly, while I think some readers noted the possible utility of working with the police, not one person voted for that option. Ah well. Fuck the police.

Also, the best comment ever was posted last episode.

Back to episode six

[NaNoWriMo] Dropping out, but still writing

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:24:46 GMT

Image by DavidTurnbull via Flickr

Here's the short version: I'm dropping out of NaNoWriMo to avoid burnout. Yes, after only five days. But I'm still writing.

The long version is that I'm only dropping out on a technicality, and here's why.

See, I've written one day on NaNoWriMo thus far. Sunday, I was physically exhausted from ICC -- no worries, it happens. Monday, I wrote a really solid 2,500 (and hated most everything I wrote, but that's part of the process, I think). Tuesday, I was out for several hours entertaining guests from Ireland, and got back late. Wednesday, I was mentally exhausted, so I gave myself a pass. Today, I was charged up for writing at work (which I've been doing pretty much every day this week), but I realized that I was dreading going back to my novel.

Now, over the past... uh... lot of years that I've been a writer, I've learned when I can push myself as a writer, and when I can't. Sometimes, I'm just being a whiny asshole, and I really need to just get off my ass and write. In fact, most times I'm being a whiny asshole. The idea of getting together and writing with other writers seemed like a perfect way to shut the whiny asshole up and get to writing. Granted, I was actually enjoying writing so I didn't need to shut the whiny asshole up, but I figured it was only a matter of time before it happened, and I was ready for it with all of NaNoWriMo's social writing and externally-imposed deadlines. But sometimes, they're warning signs of something much worse -- burnout. And everything I've been seeing the past few days was pointing to the latter.

I did some math, and realized that I hit something like 40,000 words last month, between writing for work and writing for me. That's not taking into account editing all of those words, mind you -- and many of those words went through repeated drafts. A conservative estimate of my writing this month outside my novel is around 15,000 words, and it's probably closer to 20,000. Again, that's not counting multiple revisions. Adding another 50,000 on that is a lot, even with no revision, but I've done insane workloads like that before. When I started this, I thought "No sweat, I'll just do what I did before." What I forgot is that I almost quit the industry when I was maintaining a wordcount density like that on a regular basis, because I burned myself out. And burning myself out on writing for fun when my day job is writing for money is what we in the business call a "really fucking stupid idea." To use an analogy, if I were a professional runner, I would need to always work on increasing the number of miles I run in a day, but I can't wreck my body doing it.

So if I were a runner, how would I address this? I'd slow my rate of increase, but always keep working on increasing it. And the same applies here.

Bottom line: I'm still going to work on a novel. (I am considering changing the novel, however, because writing vampires and other supernatural beasties all day and then writing for vampire hunters at night might be part of the problem -- they're more similar than I anticipated). I'm still going to try to complete it in a reasonable timeframe for me. If there are more write-ins, I'll still join in -- fuck, wordcount is wordcount, whether it's for a particular contest or not, and the last write-in was awesome. But I'm going to do it around my current obligations, at a more reasonable pace.

At the end of this, nothing has really changed, except that I'm not holding myself to an artificial expectation. Instead, I'm holding myself to a completely different artificial expectation, one that makes more sense for me.

Want to work at CCP?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:24:49 GMT

There are a number of open positions at for our various video game projects at CCP (where I work). Right now, the fastest way to be considered is to apply online at www.ccpgames.com . Descriptions can be found on our website for these openings, but some links are below.

(Note: I'm just forwarding this on from Human Resources. If you have questions, go to the website and send them there -- I'm just a writer monkey.)

Senior Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Concept Artists	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
Animator	Atlanta, USA	Art
English Game Master	Shanghai, China	Game Masters
Database Administrator	Reykjavik, Iceland	Operations
Senior Game Designer	Shanghai, China	Content & Game Design
Senior Web Developer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Web Development
Senior QA Engineer	Atlanta, USA	Quality Assurance
German speaking Game Master	Reykjavik, Iceland	Game Masters
QA Engineer	Atlanta, USA	Quality Assurance
Senior Graphics Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
Graphics Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
IT Manager	Shanghai, China	Operations
QA Engineer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Programmer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
Action Script Programmer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Artist / Graphic Designer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
QA Tester	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Customer Acquisition Manager	Atlanta, USA	Marketing
Senior Game Engineer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Game Designer	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
Senior Animation Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Technical Director	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Associate Content Developer	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
QA Tech Lead	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Content Manager	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
Engineering Manager	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Senior/Lead Character Modeler	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
Quality Assurance Engineer	Shanghai, China	Quality Assurance

[NaNoWriMo] Outlining

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:24:33 GMT

Image by eddyfate via Flickr

This weekend I finally took all of the brainstorming I've done for Night Fall and starting turning it into an outline.

I used a modified version of the Snowflake Method for plotting. Last week I started with a one-sentence "elevator pitch" for the book, and expanded that into a paragraph of five sentences, making sure that most of them ended with some sort of complication. Today I took that paragraph and expanded each sentence into its own paragraph, detailing the progression from start to finish in more detail. I then broke out each sentence of those paragraphs and numbered them. These were the building blocks for each chapter.

I then spent a couple of hours putting everything into yWriter. (For those of you familiar with yWriter, I have one "scene" per "chapter" -- I want lots of short chapters for this, so it makes the most sense structurally in the software.) I used the sentence I wrote for the chapter as the chapter's description. Each scene also asked for a goal, a conflict, and a resolution, which I filled out based on what I had in mind. This lead to some restructuring of my chapters, which I did on the fly as it made sense (and I fully expect I'll do again as the book comes along). yWriter also asks which characters are in which scenes, which forced me to start fleshing out which characters+ I'll need for the story.

I approached the novel as a straight-forward adventure story. Most of the comedy I like usually comes from entertaining writing and scenes, not from a zany plot, so I wrangled my plotting as if I were writing a legitimate vampire hunter story. Besides, by plotting "straight," I don't have to worry about whether the premise is funny (since it isn't), and I think I can find some organic humor from the plot tropes of the genre as well.

In the end, I have 29 chapters roughed out. Even if I assume about two thousand words for each chapter (which would make each chapter very short), that's 58,000 words, which is well over my NaNoWriMo goal. I think it's likely the book will end up being longer than that, though, so expect I'll be talking about this well into December. Part of what leads me into thinking this will go long is because I have 13 named characters at this point (although, to be fair, one is a pug dog).

If I have time later this week, I'll start fleshing out details on the characters to make them all unique and interesting (and funny, of course). In the meantime, I'm excited about working on this!

[NaNoWriMo] What I'm doing, and why I'm doing it

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:55:43 GMT

Image by eddyfate via Flickr

First off, I decided to write Night Fall, the parody novel of female vampire hunter "bad girl" protagonists, featuring Katrina Night. I even mocked up a fake book cover last week and posted it on Flickr, to help me visualize the book itself more clearly. I covered the various reasons why I didn't pick the other novel options a while back. I spent some of my post-surgery recovery time brainstorming and jotting down random ideas that have come to me, and man, I have tons of ideas for this. I'm actually having difficulty narrowing them all down, which is a good sign, I think.

One thing that came up over the past week or so, however, is the question "Why do NaNoWriMo at all?" Chuck Wendig actually did a good job playing devil's advocate over on his blog (which, if you are not reading, you should be), and I think it's good to spell out my specific reasons for doing this.

Why I'm Doing This

Justin talked about his reasons for doing it, and a lot of them mirror mine -- I've kicked around the idea of doing a novel for most of my life, but never actually got the stones to just do it. Strangely, although I've worked on books of over 200,000 words by myself, I have a block when it comes to idea of writing a novel. I think I'm rare in that I don't actually have any novels in any stage of completion in my writing folder, and haven't at any point in my career. I think once I actually have a novel done, even if it ultimately ends up going nowhere, the seal will be broken and starting the next one will be easier.

On the flip side, I'm trying to make myself as comfortable as possible in starting this because it's new to me. That means, unlike Justin, I'm actually approaching this with something approximating an outline (which I'll talk about in a bit).

Another part of it is that, between work and home, I've been writing much more frequently, so I'm in the habit of writing at this point. One of the greatest "secrets" of writing is that the more you do it, the more you want to do it. I'm at a good point to try something like this, and NaNoWriMo is conveniently timed -- if I was at this point in March, I might be considering a run at a novel in April instead.

Finally, a number of my friends and co-workers are all trying it this year [1]. I actually had a couple of "coffee house" nights with some friends in St. Louis, where we all got together and worked on various projects in the same space. I found that strangely helpful, so I'm eager to see what it's like writing with other people, pushing each other in the same way that workout buddies push each other during a workout.

So, I don't think this is something I'll necessarily do every year (because, as Chuck points out, if you want to write a novel, why wait until November?), but this is a confluence of events that works out for me right now.

My Tools

Notes: After a lot of brainstorming over several pages in my notebook, I'm using a personal wiki to consolidate all my notes into logical buckets. I do still have my trusty moleskine notebooks to fall back on, in case I'm stuck in an elevator with no laptop and a couple thousand words to kill.

Outline: I'm using the snowflake method of plotting (at least the first few steps) to give myself a general outline to work from, and I've already got at least something to work from (so in case I don't have any more time to poke at this between now and November 1, I'm ready to start).

Software: I'm experimenting with using yWriter 5 [2] to write the NaNo draft in, but I'm prepared to just use OpenOffice or even Notepad to hammer it out if needs be. I'm not looking for a neat toy to play around in -- I'm just trying to find a way to keep all this fast-and-furious content in some sense of order to make the eventual editing a little easier. I think yWriter will be potentially more useful than it will be distracting, but if it becomes too big of a distraction I can just copy-and-paste my wordcount into yWriter later when I'm at the revision phase.

Strategy and Balancing Projects

While I am trying to commit myself to crossing the 50k finish line, I'm not going to kill myself to do it by November 30th. I don't want Whitechapel or my paying writing to suffer -- all of that will have priority over NaNoWriMo, and if that means I have to finish on December 15th or even by the end of the year, then so be it. In the same fashion, I'm also not necessarily going to stop when I hit word 50,001. If the novel still has legs at that point, I'll continue to work on it until I can comfortably write THE END.

My strategy, however, is to constantly overwrite -- I think I can hit 2,000 daily word targets instead of the recommended 1,667 target, which means I can cross 50,000 words in 25 days instead of 30. Worst case, that leaves me with two days to write two Whitechapel episodes, two days to record and edit those Whitechapel episodes, and one day to use as a buffer. Best case, it actually leaves me three days as a buffer -- I am prepared to use Whitechapel wordcount as part of my 50k count to validate that I did, indeed, write 50k in November.

I am not above juggling the numbers on this, especially since the only one I'm doing this to impress is me.

I'll try to update this blog and/or my Twitter on my NaNoWriMo status, but only if I have time to write after my time writing.

Footnote 1: Interesting side note -- one of my co-workers is actually kicking around doing a novel that is, in terms of flavor and setting, pretty similar to my initial ideas for Thy Kingdom Come. Weird how minds think alike.

Footnote 2: I don't have a Mac anymore, or else I would totally jump on this offer to get Scrivener after NaNoWriMo.

Episode 05 Post-Mortem

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:22:24 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image via Wikipedia

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.

One thing I learned after I posted the episode was that my brain naturally goes to past tense when writing dialogue, and it’s so insidious that I don’t even notice it after several editing passes. I had to do some post-episode tense clean-up, which actually didn’t make it into the recorded episode. Now that I know to look for it, I hope it won’t be an issue in future. Still, it was weird to distinctly remember changing something only to find out that it not only wasn’t changed, but I actually said it incorrectly as well. Frustrating.

Recording actually went a little easier — although there were three times as many lines for Mr. Rich this time around, I found a system that allowed me to insert the lines much more easily. It’s still time-intensive — it takes most of an evening for me to record and edit an episode — but I’m getting better at recording more technically complicated episodes without adding too much more time to my workload.

Voting and Discussion

Voting was pretty light this week — only 29 votes — although people were shocked that they got the chance to vote more than once. Two questions jumped out into the lead pretty early, and stayed there: “Why did you call me Six?” and “If you know me, why don’t you trust me?” No one apparently had any question (or care) about what happened to Dr. Tucci — that question didn’t get a single vote.

This is actually a cool result for me, because these are two questions I fleshed out way back when I was doing the prep work for episode four, so it’ll be nice to have a chance to play with that information some more. I’m still hoping to add more questions to Six’s situation than I answer in episode six, though — we’re still in Act I, more or less, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet.

Back to episode five

Better than I thought. Also, ICC.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:01:12 GMT

Image by thinkpanama via Flickr

The check-up with the surgeon's office was very short -- mostly it was a cleaning of the extraction sites and a quick lesson in how to do it myself (twice a day). The nurse told me that actually I'm doing really well -- many patients can't really even open their mouths at this point, and nearly all of them are still on constant pain meds (I'm on one pain pill in the morning and the rest of the day on ibuprofin for the past couple of days). The pain, numbness and nausea are all common, especially with the number of extractions I had (apparently I had twelve novocaine injections for this surgery). I asked if I would be able to eat and talk around this time next week, and the nurse said that shouldn't be a problem, and if it is a problem, I should probably come in for another (free) post-op check-up.

I asked because next week is ICC. I also found out that I'm going to be working in the office for parts of ICC weekend -- probably all of Wednesday, and likely at least part of Thursday and Friday. That may also mean coming home Wednesday and Thursday night to make sure our pets are handled and fed, and so I can get up and go to work without bothering Michelle and David by waking up insanely early (by convention standards). So, I'm not going to be around as much as I've been at previous ICCs -- in fact, I think this ICC I'll be positively scarce until Friday evening. This does mean I don't have to rush Whitechapel, though, and I might even fudge my NaNoWriMo wordcount to start late next week instead of trying to cram it in on the Sunday of ICC.

Which reminds me -- I need to post about my NaNoWriMo plans. But first, I need to do the Whitechapel Post-Mortem.

Two steps forward, one step back

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:39:27 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

Tuesday night, while I was playing Brutal Legend, I was struck with sudden and massive nausea. I went to lie down for a bit. I ate a little, and that seemed to help, but I went to bed very early. I woke up nearly 12 hours later, still nauseous and still exhausted, so I took another sick day from work and stayed home.

Today I'm feeling about where I was Tuesday morning (maybe a bit better, since I'm managing my pain with only ibuprofin). I have some nausea medication with me at work, just in case, and I have a follow-up with my surgeon this afternoon. I'm hoping to catch up on my Whitechapel post-mortem tonight, as well as catching up on some work today.

For some reason I thought this recovery would be a slam-dunk because I've been through so many surgeries, but I'm just moving back to an old coping mechanism -- taking it one day at a time.

Oh, hey, I had some surgery

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:19:19 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

I realized that while I mentioned this obliquely, I haven't actually talked about my recent surgery, or why I needed to have it. Let me correct that oversight now.

About a month ago, I went to a new dentist for a (long overdue) checkup. She took some X-rays, and said that all four of my wisdom teeth are sideways in my gums, and the lower two were pushing against my roots. She suggested that I get those two removed, and referred to me an oral surgeon. After I worked out the best time at work to take a few days off, I talked to said surgeon, and we decided to just go ahead and get all four removed so I don't have to do this again in a year or so.

The surgery was Friday. As far as I know, it went well -- I went to sleep and woke up with a sore throat and gauze in my mouth (which sounds much more interesting than it really was). Michelle drove me home, and I stayed in bed all day watching videos on my laptop and trying to find ways to swallow pills without opening my mouth too much. The next three days were an exercise in relearning how to chew, talk, and play video games while under the influence of pain meds. (Note: I have no idea how good it is while sober, but Brutal Legend is hella fun while on pain pills.)

Today I'm back at work. I'm mentally and physically exhausted, and I'm still not too far beyond eating soft foods, but I'm able to do more than sit on the couch and try not to accidentally bite my tongue. It might be another day or two before I do much more than get up, go to work, go home and lie on the couch for several hours, but I'm slowly ramping up to something approximating "normal." I'm going to have a post-op follow-up Thursday afternoon.

Down to two

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:51:15 GMT

I looked over the poll results, and I did a lot of thinking about what I really want to write. (I even added a novel idea that I forgot about, got attached to it for a while, and then ultimately cut it.) Ultimately, I told myself that there's a decent chance that all of those will get written at some point, so I just had to decide what I really wanted to live with right now for a month straight.

The Bureau wasn't particularly popular, and I just spent a couple of weeks working on a superhero RPG anyway, so I cut that pretty quickly.

Writing two projects at the same time means I should probably diversify, or else I'll get sick of writing horror/mystery after November, which isn't fair to Whitechapel. That meant cutting As The Devil Drives and Do The Job (which was the professional wrestling/murder mystery idea I remembered after I posted last night).

Thy Kingdom Come was surprisingly popular (both in the poll and to me personally), but references to steampunk actually decided it for me. TKC was an idea I had long before the steampunk craze came along, because I love 19th century literature. However, I'm kind of sick of steampunk right now, and a check of my gut made me go "blech" when thinking about it. I do want to write that book at some point (maybe even next year), but I'm just not in the brainspace to do that now. If I were freelancing, I'd suck it up and deal with it, but since I'm primarily writing this for me, I gave myself a pass.

Besides -- I think I really want to stretch my skills and try comedy. And that pretty much narrowed the field to Terrifying Disappointment and Night Fall.

Both have some characters I'm intrigued by. Both have some rough basics of the background sketched out. Both have some vague plots in my head. And both have huge gaps of personal knowledge that terrify me. It's a balance of comfort and fear that's probably good for me.

Thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts on this. Now I have to push this to the back of my head, read up on a couple of things, and lay the groundwork for next week, so I can make a decision and (if I decide I'm crazy enough to do this), start outlining and researching after my surgery.

What novel should I write?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:39:56 GMT

Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I'm seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining... well, now.

I've actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I've never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well -- Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I've written whole books before, I haven't ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn't to say that I haven't had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I've had several. I've managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I'm having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y'all thought. I won't necessarily go with the most popular option -- it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn't realize it -- but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won't believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going -- a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it's got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I've been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I've never done before.
The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I've been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure if it's a novel or something else.
Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I've worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if you have a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want -- again, I'm not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can't vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)

View Poll: What book should I write?

My muse is trying to kill me

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:24:05 GMT

Image by eddyfate via Flickr

"Where do you get your ideas from?"

It's actually not a question I get a whole lot anymore. Maybe it's because people are starting to realize that it's become the most cliche thing you can say to a writer, or maybe it's because I tend to be known for working on licensed or collaborative products, and people assume I just don't have any ideas of my own. Anyhow, while I don't get questioned about it a lot, people certainly still seem confused by my relationship with the writing process.

As an example, last week I was at a LARP, but spent nearly two hours out of the game. Instead, I was sequestered in the tiny kitchen of the game site, scribbling ideas for a new RPG system furiously in my notebook and testing them out with playing cards and character sheets scratched out on the back of my own. Last night I sat down to just jot down a few ideas, and next thing I knew it was 1 in the morning, and the rest of my family was already off in bed.

I can see why people used to think that creativity came from a spirit or demon -- there are a lot of times when I feel an idea possesses me rather than gets created by me. Of course, it's still a lot of really hard work to get that idea from something rattling around in my head to something that can be seen, but sometimes the idea just sits in the front of my brain and will just poke at me until I sit the fuck down and do something about it. The interesting part is that the more I work on it, the more that other projects jump up and demand to be worked on as well. And when I get into a steady rhythm of writing daily, I find it harder and harder not to write daily. (This is why the first piece of writing advice you'll probably ever get is "Write every day.")

Let me give you a peek into the various projects I've been working on over the past few weeks. Note that this is all outside of my work writing:

An RPG system based around teams of criminals put together for heists and con jobs
Another RPG system (this time for superheroes) that's a mash-up between Fudge and 4C (which started as just some house rules for a potential Nextwave campaign)
A superhero universe I've kicked around for years that might be part of said RPG, or might be used somewhere else
Whitechapel episodes and promotion
"Gloomy Sunday," the short story for the Close Encounters of the Urban Kind anthology
More brainstorming for Katrina Night, my comedic vampire bad girl fiction (which, if I lose my damned mind, I might use for NaNoWriMo this year)
A space opera universe (featuring the crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment) that I briefly considered as an audio drama

Odds are pretty good that only a couple of these will actually see the light of day -- some of these are old projects that have been sitting on my hard drive for years, and there's easily another dozen or two projects to keep them company. But on the other hand, Whitechapel was one of those projects, and it's finally out and getting people excited, so maybe some day a few of these will be out in the open.

Whatever. The point is, my muse is trying to kill me. But what a way to go.

Slight bump for episode 6

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:14:46 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Things still look good for releasing episode 5 of Whitechapel tomorrow. However, I have oral surgery late next week (I’m having four wisdom teeth removed), which means I’m going to be on pain meds and healing when I would normally be writing and recording episode 6. In fact, the oral surgeon specifically said “You’re not going to be able to focus or concentrate for long stretches while you’re recovering, and I’m pretty sure both are required for writing.”

Actually, we were talking about my day job writing, but the principle is the same. Also, I think I need my mouth to be working in order to record podcasts, since I haven’t figured out the “brain to computer” plug-in for Audacity.

On top of that, at the end of the month is the International Camarilla Convention here in Atlanta, which is a show I’m going to be working at all weekend. Even if I somehow kept the schedule on track around my oral surgery, that means I would have to try to write and record episode 7 around ICC, which is also pretty damned unlikely. (Especially since I’m going to try to record material at the show for my other podcast, the White Wolf Blogcast.)

To solve both problems, I’m going to bump the voting period for episode 5 to two weeks instead of one. This means that voting for episode 5 will close at midnight (EST) on Wednesday, October 21st, episode 6 will be available for reading and download on Wednesday, October 28th, voting for that episode will run until November 4th, and so on. I’m going to try to have my usual post-mortem post for episode 5 on the 21st, but we’ll see what shape I’m in at that stage. Think of it as more time to convince your fellow listeners to vote the way you think they should, or as me conducting research into blood, pain, and discomfort to help the story along.

Giving Away Agent Patriot

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:37:22 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

A few months back, I talked about poking around with Inform 7 and working on an Agent Patriot text adventure. I realized recently that I'm not going to come back around to this -- I just have too many other projects going on to give this the attention it deserves. I learned a lot from working on it, but after repeatedly banging my head into walls with trying to get the system to do what I wanted, I've decided to abandon the project.

However, since the Agent Patriot universe is open under Creative Commons, I'm going to throw my cobbled-together code out to the Internet, in case anyone else wanted to pick up the project (or at least see how horribly I botched it). You can download it from my Dropbox account here:

Agent Patriot I -- Blitzkrieg: New Amsterdam

I also used Inform 7 to test out some of my initial ideas for Whitechapel. People really interested in the minutae of my process can check out the Inform 7 files for that project as well:

The Whitechapel Project

You will need to download Inform 7 to use either of these files. You should be able to just expand them, move the folders to Inform 7's "Projects" folder, and open the project in Inform 7.

There's a chance I might flirt with Inform 7 down the road, but I think I'll approach it with a story that's actually suited for the medium, instead of trying to work an existing piece of fiction into the IF format.

Agent Mission 2: Propaganda and Murder

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:42:55 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image via Wikipedia

Welcome back, agents. Now that you have completed your basic training, we move to your first field mission.

But first, I want to take a moment to commend some of you on your exemplary initiative. Many agents have gone out of their way to spread the word about Whitechapel. Some have also donated time and resources to the site, and others have volunteered for the future. It’s great to know that we have such an enthusiastic team of agents ready to go, and if any agent is ever at a loss as to how they can help, there’s always the “Like To Help?” link at the top of every page.

Enough with the back-patting. We have some work to do.

Whitechapel has two major initiatives, and today we’re going to focus on the podcast. The podosphere is full of hot zones where thousands of podcasts fight for supremacy (or at least downloads). We’ve established bases at many of these hot zones to assess the situation. And now, we begin the fight in earnest.

The primary goal of each of the two mission objectives below is to spread the word about Whitechapel, by voting five stars (or the highest equivalent) at each site. Normally I’d suggest that everyone vote with their conscience and simply pass the word, but fuck that — this is war! Five stars everywhere you go!

The Strategic Fronts

These three fronts are key to our long-term plans, so visit all of them, sign up as needed (none of them cost anything to join), and vote five stars for Whitechapel at each:

These four fronts are still helpful to our long-term plans, but not as key:

If you can spread the word about our benevolent dictatorship at four of these fronts, you have a chance to have your name immortalized in the annals of war!

Eddy, cut the shit. What the hell do you need us to do?

Okay, okay. Sometimes I let the whole “agents” metaphor get away from me. In plain English:

Go to the three key sites listed above, and at least one of the other sites listed, and vote five stars or the highest equivalent at each. You can do all seven if you like, but you only need to do four.
Once you’ve done that, email me at whitechapelproject@gmail.com and tell me which sites you visited and voted at. I don’t have any way of checking, so this is all on the honor system — don’t be a douche.
If I get your email before midnight (EST) on Thursday, October 8th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a fabulous prize.

What prize?

If you win the drawing, I’m going to kill you off.

Uh, what?

Seriously. The winner (or, in a pinch, someone the winner loves) will give their name to a character in a future episode of Whitechapel, who will then die at a later point. The more enthusiastic the voting at the podcast sites, the more gruesome and bloody the death will be. I might even have you die at VI’s hands directly, but we’ll see how the voting pans out in future.

Good luck, soldier! Report back when you’ve spread the word about Whitechapel!

Update: Since some people can’t or don’t want to install iTunes to vote at the iTunes Store, as long as you vote at at least four sites, you’re eligable.

Writing and writing and writing

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:38:57 GMT

Image by olinlibref via Flickr

Before I start, I need a moment.

Ahem.

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST I'M GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN A FICTION ANTHOLOGY.

Whew. There. Now that that's out of my system, "Gloomy Sunday" has been confirmed as one of the stories in the upcoming Close Encounters of the Urban Kind by Apex Publishing. This is awesome for a couple of reasons: it's only the second time I've been paid for my straight fiction (the first was "Questions" for the Pseudopod podcast), and it's the first time I've been invited into an anthology instead of blindly submitting a story for consideration. I have a chance to do a polish and reformatting pass before the editor gives me redlines. And then, at some point in the future, the awesome happens.

But no time to slow down. I've been chugging along on Whitechapel, and I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out. I've been babbling about my writing process on that project quite a bit -- you can check out my post-mortems if you're interested.

And because my brain doesn't have enough going on, I've been poking around with an older project for the past few days -- a weird kind of pulp superhero universe. It's something I've kicked around for a few years now, but it's been intermingled with some other projects in my head, and I'm in the process of slowly extracting them so I can focus on fleshing out those elements. Originally I had a few different OpenOffice documents that I was trying to keep notes in, but it was hard to keep track of all the interconnections, so I'm now putting all my notes into a TiddlyWiki page. My time running a Scion cycle on Obsidian Portal has helped me to think of ways to use a wiki for cross-referencing world information and characters. Of course, I don't have any plans to work on comic scripts or a superhero RPG, so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with it just yet, but I'm sure I'll have some fun with it at some point.

Episode 04 Post-Mortem

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:30:06 GMT

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

: Image via Wikipedia

Author’s Commentary

Over the past few episodes, I had fallen into a rhythm with writing episodes of Whitechapel: post-mortem on Wednesday (which, after last episode’s close voting, I’m going to probably bump to Thursdays to let the poll close before I comment), first 1000 words on Thursday, revision and last 500-1000 words on Friday, let it sit for two days to think over, and final revision on Monday before recording on Tuesday.

This time, Thursday was right out, and most of Friday was out too. I had a little time to jot some ideas in my notebook, but as I started putting things together, I realized that I needed to actually determine some of the story’s back history (at least enough so that I could move forward). I took some initial notes, but I spent Saturday sketching it all out. Sunday I plowed through an entire first draft, and Monday I spent revising it. Tuesday I was ill and just not in the right frame of mind to record, so I did it on Wednesday.

Of course, very little of the material I came up with on Saturday actually ended up in the episode, but at least it helped me to think about this upcoming episode, so it wasn’t wasted. Just hectic.

To top it all off, I had planned to introduce a guest voice into the podcast this episode — the mysterious driver, played by David Bounds. We actually came up with a good system: he records his lines in Garageband on his laptop, each as a separate file, and then uploads them to our shared drive. I import each file and line it up with the appropriate part of my reading. It took a little longer to produce, but he really nailed the sound I wanted for that character better than I could have, so it was totally worth it. And based on the voting, this character will be around for at least another episode.

As for the writing, it was pretty straightforward once I had a plan. I knew this was going to be a slower piece after three episodes of “get VI the hell out of the Whitechapel Project.” It was pretty easy to change the mystery focus from VI’s amnesia and surroundings to that of the car and the driver, so I played with that some this time.

The scene with the fast food originally came about because the episode seemed a bit rushed and needed something to stretch it out, but it ended up accentuating the core conflict of the episode (”who is the driver?”), so I was very pleased with it.

A quick note of thanks to my wife, Michelle, for helping me out on what happens to people when they lose their skin. I had to pause when writing that scene because I disturbed myself with the imagery. I also had to rewrite it a fair bit, because the first draft was kind of wimpy, and I really wanted to sell the grossness of the situation.

Voting and Discussion

The choice actually took me a while to word, because I wanted to be honest, but not too honest. Specifically “try to incapacitate or kill my assailant” had an emphasis on try. As one of the readers pointed out (I think it was Rob Justice), not everything VI tries necessarily has to succeed, and this was the first time that I put out an option that was probably doomed to failure. I debated for a while on it, but I was confident that the story would definitely have taken a different turn if he tried (and failed) to attack the driver then if he had tried to talk his way out of it.

Also, wow. The number of votes went from 37 to 46, tying the number of votes from episode one. Next week, let’s see if we can go for 50!

The voting itself was pretty much the inverse of last episode — it started off very, very close at the start (even holding a three-way tie for most of a day) before one option slowly but steadily pulled into the lead. So, next episode VI will be dropping his Tucci disguise and telling the driver the truth about what’s going on.

The discussion was more subdued this time, but most people seemed to like the twist of the (circumstantial so far) consequences of VI’s ability to disguise himself, which I’m very pleased by. Given that this episode was mostly tension with a bit of violence at the end, I’m not too surprised that the chatter was a bit lower this week.

Back to Episode Four

Revenge of the Cyborg Barbarians

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:06:40 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

Things have been pretty busy 'round here lately. A couple of weeks ago I took on some new job responsibilities[1] which have involved a lot of learning new things. It also involved moving from an office with a Mac computer to a cube with a Vista computer. It's really exciting, and I'm enjoying the challenge, but man, shit be crazy trying to stay on top of things right around now. As an example, something that I thought would only take me a few hours over the weekend pretty much took up most of it. I'm still managing to keep a lot of balls in the air (like Whitechapel), but some other things have had to be put on hold for a bit while I settle into a new routine (like the White Wolf Blogcast).

When I've had a moment to reflect here and there, I've been poking around with more old-school gaming. NetHack and AngBand have been an entertaining distraction, and the sheer unrepentantly wacky fantasy has been surprisingly refreshing. Elf ninjas mixing it up with cyborg barbarians is just so unabashedly and unrepentantly fun. Sure, I still prefer games with strong narratives and deep immersion, but memories of Final Fantasy VII[2] and Thundarr the Barbarian[3] remind me of a time when I thought wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat while wielding a katana actually was cool, and not just a stereotype.

So I've been flipping through everything from retroclone games like Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy to loving parodies like Encounter Critical to actual classic game experiences like Rifts and red box D&D. Playing in a D&D 4e game at work has been helping to scratch that itch a bit, but I admit I'm not entirely sure if I really want to break out a new game to recapture the fun of wahoo fantasy, or if the idea of such a game is more interesting than actually playing one. Nostalgia is a fickle mistress.

I've also recently (and somewhat coincidentally) been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi: Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (TV show), and Red Vs. Blue, which have been leading me to some ideas for a new fiction project... but that's later. Probably after Whitechapel is done.

Speaking of nostalgia, I've been slowly reconnecting with some of my old elementary and high school friends on Facebook. I mean, most people talk about using Facebook to find old classmates, but I didn't really look any of them up. They just kind of found me. And it's been a weird (but very pleasant) experience. It's all been coalescing into a stew of contemplation.

I finally picked up a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street after seven million people[4] expressed disbelief that I hadn't read it yet. Overall it's been enjoyable. Plus, right now it's a bit easier to read a short story in between things going on instead of trying to stay on top of a 2,000 page novel from George R. R. Martin.

Eh, that's that. Brain's dry.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: No, I can't really talk about them at the moment.

Footnote 2: Swords that shoot bullets and have magic gem slots in a cyberpunk world? FUCK YES.

Footnote 3: Ditto for laser swords and sorcery.

Footnote 4: Give or take 6,999,993.