The Last Voyage of Demeter comes out on August 11th in the UK, the second movie from Universal this year featuring Dracula. Long Undead is my Dracula story and he’s being rather elusive -clearly this spotlight on him in the movies is keeping him from paying attention to my little novel- and as a result I started playing with ChatGPT and had it give me an outline for a neo-western horror movie that I’ve named Wild Stone. A side project if you like, to see how I can use AI to help in the writing process and work out what feels right for me.
Am I still a writer if I use ChatGPT? There is a bit of an angry mob declaring on Twitter (and probably other social media platforms, I haven’t checked) that if you use ChatGPT to write, you’re not a writer. Well, I remember when self-publishing began and if you did that you weren’t a real author. Makes me wonder if when computers came out there was an uproar in the streets about not using those new fangled contraptions to write, if you didn’t write it on a typewriter you weren’t a real writer.
Come on guys, it’s a tool!
Learn how to use it to your advantage, use it to flesh out ideas, use it to write blurbs and social media content relating to the book, let it help you with log lines and suggest things when you can’t figure it out yourself. Let it point you in the right direction of the thing you’re trying to do so you’re not sitting frustrated at your desk searching through endless websites (are you even a writer if you don’t go to the library and do your research in books?).
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
I had totally forgotten about this movie, the whole movie is just one section of the Dracula story. And Dracula is in the Nosferatu style. Did you know that Nosferatu came about because the Bram family, at the time, didn’t want the film to have any connection to the Dracula novel and so to continue making the movie they simply changed the names?
Based on a single chapter, the Captain’s Log, from Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula, the story is set aboard the Russian schooner Demeter, which was chartered to carry private cargo – twenty-four unmarked wooden crates – from Carpathia to London. The film will detail the strange events that befell the doomed crew as they attempt to survive the ocean voyage, stalked each night by a terrifying presence on board the ship. When it finally arrived near Whitby Harbour, it was a derelict. There was no trace of the crew.
–The Last Voyage of the Demeter, IMDb–
The ship itself, in the original Dracula novel, was based on an actual ship called the Dmitri. And that wasn’t the only thing changed about the original Dracula –you can read more here. Even the counts name was originally something a little different, I’m glad it got changed.
But back to The Last Voyage of the Demeter, starring Corey Hawkins who you may recognise from 6 Underground, Liam Cunningham or perhaps you’d recognise him as Davos Seaworth from Game of Thrones, and also from Game of Thrones Aisling Franciosi who played Lyanna Stark, and in the role of Dracula we have Javier Botet who we’ve previously seen in The Mummy, It, and The Conjuring 2.
A Long Undead Update
I’ve hit a bit of a block, I’ve reached the beginning of the story as I was originally writing it (with the hundreds of false starts and going back hundreds of years earlier and finding a different writing style/view point) and now need to continue in the style I’ve been writing but I feel like I’m just hitting the same wall from the other side. Perhaps I need to re-plot the original outline because I thought I knew where I wanted it to go but perhaps it’s the wrong direction. This novel is taking me way longer than I ever thought it would and I’m finding I have less time to sit down and work on it. But at the same time, I don’t want to rush to finish it just to have something new out there. But I won’t be asking for ChatGPT’s help on this one.
It has a habit of consuming me whenever I have a few days off together with nothing to do, so perhaps it will be done in long writing sessions as I listen to strange music and drink copious amounts of coffee.
Wild Stone
I asked ChatGPT for a logline for the script. A logline gives the the reader five pieces of information, who the main character is, the world they live in, what sets them on their journey, what the conflict is, and what the stakes are.
Or, in other words, When [inciting incident] a [character type] must [objective] before [stakes]
I did not tell it the above format initially, I simply asked it for the logline for the outline. This is what it gave me:
A tough and resourceful rancher in the American West is haunted by her tragic past. When she discovers mysterious symbols carved into the rocks near her ranch, she sets out to investigate with the help of a rugged cowboy who is also searching for something in the wilderness. As they delve deeper into the wilderness, they encounter eerie sights and sinister figures connected to an ancient evil lurking in the wilderness. With sacrifices along the way, they ultimately confront the evil in a final showdown and ride off into the sunset, leaving the wilderness behind.
I then asked it to follow the above structure and it gave me:
When a tough and resourceful rancher discovers strange symbols in the wilderness, she must team up with a rugged cowboy and investigate the symbols before they are captured by a group of sinister figures and face an ancient evil that has been lurking in the wilderness for centuries.
Bare in mind, the information it has to write this with is only the outline it previously gave me and not the fleshed out and worked on version. It’s not terrible but would I want to watch it?
Horror and Fantasy Author – Also writing as K.T. McQueen. Love Western Horror, cowboy boots, my cactus Collin, & my Demon Cat.
Moths – I hate moths, the way they flutter at your face!
