Over ten years ago, I wrote a short story titled “Hunted Under the Light of the Moon” which was inspired by Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” It was a vampire story I wrote as an exercise and a way to do some world-building for a series of vampire novels I had conceived. While this series was put on the shelf, I wrote up the rough draft and posted it on my old blogs just to get some feedback. Now, ten years later, after some more tinkering here and there, I decided to pick it up and start a new draft of a novella-length version. Except, I decided to post it to ChatGPT, out of curiosity, and it has prompted me to make some additional changes to “Hunted Under the Light of the Moon.”
The first and biggest change is transitioning the story from a short story into a novella. Short stories tend to be 1,000-10,000 words, but after further developing the story, the characters, and even the setting I figured the story could reach around 15,000 words minimum. The original outline was just three chapters long and, for the new version, I increased it to nine chapters. And while I wasn’t exactly impressed with ChatGPT’s version of my story, I did like the idea of adding in a cabin scene for my story. Adding this scene will allow me to give the protagonist a more plausible way to get the tools he could use to help fight his vampire opponent rather than having some items randomly in his pockets like an RPG
As for the protagonist, ChatGPT really helped me as a research tool in locking down some specific details for his background and profile. What would have taken me a while to do on my own, the chatbot reduced to a couple of minutes. And the information I had it look up helped to develop the protagonist a bit more. Granted, he is still somewhat one-dimensional as a bad guy in his motive – just wanting to hunt Jonas. But there is more in his background that I am hoping to incorporate into the story so the reader can learn more about vampires and Darius in general.
I also gave Darius an additional vampire ability as a way to make things more interesting when it comes to learning about Darius and even interacting with Jonas throughout the hunt.
Another change being made is to the start of the story. Rather than immediately taking place in the forest, it now takes place in the bar where Darius ambushes Jonas. It gives me the chance to introduce the readers to Jonas and divulge more about him while setting up the conflict to take place between him and Darius while increasing the amount of characters in the story.
The ending is changing as well. Shortly after I published the rough draft of the story, I knew that its end would have to be changed. Mostly that a helicopter with people would show up. However, I needed to make sure there was a logical reason for a helicopter of armed people to show up in the first place. Originally, it was going to be the fire that Jonas sets at the end of the fight. But, while plausible, it wouldn’t have resulted in such a quick response in real life.
Which is one of the main reasons why I decided to include the bar setting. It gives me the chance to set things up at the start of the story to bring it full circle and have the helicopter come at the right time for more plausible reasons.
So the plan is to try and get the rough draft of the novella written within two weeks. Currently, I’m at 3,800 words and want to be done with this new draft by February 14th at the latest. If things were optimal I would want to get the second draft done before February ends. But family obligations and constant interruptions might make the latter goal nigh-impossible. Which means I’ll have to scale way back on blogging and some other things to try and give myself enough time to hit my daily writing goals to meet the deadline.
Finally, while planning out a timeline for this novella, I also quickly created a placeholder “cover” image using a combination of AI and canva. It gives me a visual representation of what I might want the cover to look like. So let me know what you think about it!
Otherwise, those are the major changes I am making to “Hunted Under the Light of the Moon.”
Feel free to let me know what you think about the changes being made in the comments below or on social media.
Check out my ChatGPT and Me column to read more about “Hunted Under the Light of the Moon” and the chatbot’s version of it.
Author’s Note: Support this site by donating via Paypal or even checking out our merchandise on RedBubble where you can find designs that cater to writers and readers. Money donated and raised goes into paying for this website and equipment.
