Eliwood S. Gheist

Hello, friends!

February may be the shortest month on the calendar, but somehow it always feels to drag on the longest. No holiday excitement leftover from December and January, and in my neck of the woods, nowhere close to the excitement of Spring.

March, on the other hand…

Well, there’s still a lot of snow on the ground, but as a lifelong upstate New Yorker, I can say with full confidence that there is absolutely a difference between winter snow and spring snow. Winter snow is bitter. Winter snow sees your road salt and car scraper and laughs and laughs, because watch out, bucko, there’s more there that came from. Winter snow grabs at your boots, slices through your windbreaker, and taunts the hat your mother crocheted for you.

But spring snow…yeah. Spring snow just knows its time is up. Sure, it acts tough and mean, and keeps spitting out whatever it can at you. But as we all know, there still comes the time when the ice will inevitably melt. At a certain point, it’s not about hope – it’s about grit, stubbornness, and spite. There will be better days ahead, and by the undersea eldritch gods, I will be there to see them.

So here’s what I got up to in February!

Eyes Shine Silver in Moonlight: Draft 3

I have fallen into a really nice rhythm for working on my WIPs, that has been more or less consistent since November 2023. I set a workable goal, usually a combination of a month for prep/edits followed by a month of drafting and then a month off, or at least a month of working on a separate project. I’m tempted to push that month off away more and more, but the time off is crucial. I’ve spent a good amount of my creative life in periods of burn out, and I know I need to honor my productivity by allowing myself time to rest.

All that is to say, in November 2025 I completed a full draft, rested in December, and in January I began editing Draft 2 of Eyes Shine Silver in Moonlight so that in February, I could write Draft 3.

My drafting pace is fairly uncommon, and it feels very weird to think about. When I’m not in burnout, my daily word productivity is pretty high. As long as I know what I want to write and I have the time and energy, completing an 80-120k manuscript in 30 days is very doable. But the trade off is: I have to be able to run straight through. If I stop in the middle, or get distracted, or hit a major road block, the derailment can cost the entire draft for me. This also means I have to do a lot of significant upfront work in both prepping and in editing; I’ve almost run into some real issues if my editing notes are very vague, like “I don’t like this, fix later” or “Find some way to get [x] and [y] characters to do [z].” If I have to stop and think while drafting, I come perilously close to losing it entirely. I have a graveyard of manuscripts in my hard drive that have fallen victim to the “oh I’ll come back to this later” plague.

So while I’m grateful that my drafting pace is pretty good, I have to be very aware of the pitfalls that come with it. There’s no one correct way to write, after all – just managing the best way for your own brain to do it.

ALL of that is to say – I had a decent 80k manuscript in ESSiM Draft 2, I read through it to make my editing notes in January, and thought to myself – wow. This is one of the shortest manuscripts I’ve produced in the last couple years. The Bludeye books are all easily north of 100k. And honestly, I could probably tighten up a lot of these Werewolf shenanigans. I bet this could go down to 75, or even 75k with this draft.

*laughs in foolish hindsight*

So anyway, after polishing up and adding a couple scenes for clarity and character building, Draft 3 of ESSiM was finished on February 18th at a whopping 103,023 words. It is shelved, backed up, and waiting for the next round of edits.

For March, which is technically supposed to be a “rest” month (even though I finished ESSiM a bit early and already had some rest), I’m participating in Monster Mash Madness! One of my online writing groups has been marking this tradition for three years now, of writing a 10k monsterotica novella in March just for funsies. I’ve gotten started on my dragon-bangin’, Jersey Devil ridin’, demonic god cunnilingusin’ piece and…I might manage to actually keep it around 10k?

(For those who don’t know, Eyes Shine Silver started as 2025’s Monster Mash Madness piece, and ended up being close to 50k. Whomp whomp.)

After that, I’m eyeballing Draft 3 of Return to Bludeye Beach…

Stay warm friends, and keep yourselves safe!

-Eliwood