Eliwood S. Gheist

It’s a rainy May morning here at Gheist HQ. In between projects and gardening and doctor visits, I spent much of April feeling contemplative and uncomfortable. In the same morning, I found out I needed surgery for an oversized kidney stone, and that I was losing my job.

For a double barrel of bad news, I have to say, I got away with pretty minimal damage. Three procedures and weeks of a giant tube in my kidneys later, my body feels back to normal. My friends and family were magnificently kind and helped me through the ordeal. And, thanks to the fluke of timing, not working while going through it was honestly a relief. I haven’t found a new job yet, but I’m grateful to have the time to recover.

But before I get too contemplative here, let’s focus on some updates.

What I’ve Been Up To

In April, I was able to finish Draft 4 of Return to Bludeye Beach, the sequel to my now published Bludeye Beach. I’m very happy with how this entry into the Bludeye world is coming along. It’s more focused on the characters and their individual journeys, while also accompanied by a lot of Weird Shit going on. Edie and Milo have quite a long ways to go, still, in their relationship with each other; exploring that amidst everything they have already gone through and everything they’re currently going through has been immensely satisfying for me. This is despite the fact that, while writing the first draft for this book in November of 2024, I was getting nightmares from how close to the bone their journey was getting.

In May, I’m taking a Bludeye break and working on editing my manuscript of Eyes Shine Silver in Moonlight, with an eye to write draft 4 hopefully in June. While these are both fourth drafts, I think that ESSiM is much less mature than Return; either because of how ESSiM came to be, or because Return is a sequel, I’m not sure. But writing is not a race. It doesn’t particularly matter to me if one book needs six drafts, and another needs ten. All that really matters is that I’m happy with the final product.

In more exciting news, I’ve planned a book launch party for Bludeye Beach! It turns out, you don’t really need to wait permission to do something. I just kinda … did it! This may not seem terribly revelatory, but for me, it truly was. One setback of self/indie publishing is that you don’t really have a higher authority telling you how to promote your book, or arranging events around it. But there’s also nothing in the rules that says an indie author can’t plan their own book launch party. Thanks to the kindness of Books End Bookshop, I will be able to properly celebrate one of my proudest accomplishments with anyone who wants to join in.

And in case you’re not local to the area, I’m setting up a livestream of a reading from Bludeye Beach! You can watch along on May 16th at 1:00PM ET!

Twelve Years of Reflection

The thought I keep circling back to is that this isn’t the first spring that I’ve spent unemployed. In March of 2014, I had been living with a (now) ex after following him to Chicago to support his education dreams. That whole story is best told over drinks, but he dumped me, I left Chicago, and came back home to Central New York to figure out what to do with my life, since the one I’d planned had crumbled. (Spoiler: I got a much better life after that, and a much, much better partner.)

In the spring of 2014, I moved back in with my parents in their house in the country, and had little else better to do than watch lilacs slowly grow their buds, dandelions carpet the yard in gold, and take long walks in the woods, listening to bird song. Spring is a time of energy and growth and fervent building, but from the outside, a lot of it is just … quiet. Rain pattering on new leaves. Wildlife gently creeping out from their winter holes. Grass gently reviving itself as insects slowly fill the air.

I eventually got a new job, continued my degree in Computer Science, and met the love of my life, all by the end of 2014.

And then … 2020.

Four numbers that describe one year, and pretty much all of us know what that year means.

I bought a house with the love of my life in 2018, and in 2019, I fell aggressively into gardening, surprising myself. So much so that I started a journal tracking my progress and what I was learning.

In March of 2020, I picked it up again to record what I had learned. But gardening wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I was still working, but had been sent home to work remotely. And the world was starting to shut down.

An excerpt, abbreviated:

I planted the seeds on 3/17. Since I am now working from home to self-quarantine, they make a good desk-mate as I work at the dining room table. I wonder, will history remember this as the time of the Corona Virus, or COVID-19?

It’s odd to study history in school. You learn the sanitized blob of facts and myths that has become a cultural narrative. If you are lucky, you may learn more than the basic outline of historical events, and maybe even begin to pick out the trail of human history that led to this day, this moment. And maybe in an abstract way, you can safely imagine yourself as a soldier the civil war, or a European colonizer seeing new land for the first time, or even try to press yourself into a sweaty, humid jungle, the prototype of animals that roamed a planet unrecognizable from what it is now. What was it like to be conscious of the moments both before and after human beings traveled into space? How did people think of the world before they knew about the microscopic germs and bacteria that caused infinite tragedy?

What will it be like to grow up in an America, in a world, so secure in its medical advances, that still fell prey to a global pandemic?

Two weeks ago, I was recovering from a light head cold, and worried vaguely, in a detached way, about people in Iran and China that were falling prey to a new virus. It’s like SARS, I thought, or swine flu, or Ebola, or bird flu. I’ve seen these all, come and go. People have died – unfortunate. People panicked – inevitable. The furthest any of those went to touch me, personally? I was in college for H1N1. Our RA gave a meeting about proper hand washing technique. Years later, I went on a date with a guy who told me about how certain tribes in Africa disposed of dead bodies, and how that would directly impact the spread of Ebola. We didn’t go out past two dates.

Covid-19 felt different. Somehow. Maybe because of the massive inter connectivity of the human race, due to the glut of social media interactions, of how the internet gives everything this sense of immediacy.

Maybe it felt different because of a Trumpist administration. The fragility of everyday life has become so much more apparent, when your government is so unstable, so clearly a minefield of squalling, selfish children, riddled with the pestilence of their own greed and corruption. Perhaps, because we already felt vulnerable, Covid-19 felt different.

Trump cut down the CDC and disbanded the federal Pandemic Response team in 2018. Every person who dies, loses their job, loses their home, loses their family – it is all because of Trump. For goodness’ sake, if nothing else, let history remember that. Let history remember that real people lost real things because of a federal government manned by incompetent, thieving criminals.

If there is any justice, let Covid-19 be it.

I don’t know how scared I am, of my husband losing his job, or his health insurance. I don’t know how scared I am of getting sick, or of my husband getting sick, or my parents or my friends or my family.

I know I have been crying, spontaneously, over unimportant things. I know I am fixating on weird memes, on small tasks. I don’t think I can even process how scared I am of everything else. And yet … I am numb. This year was terrifying already. This … Covid-19 is like nothing we’ve ever experienced. I don’t think I know how to think about it. I’m just trying to focus on every day; working remotely, caring for our pets. Starting seed trays.

I had it in my mind that we just needed to get through two weeks, or at worst, a month. I am beginning to realize … there is no way to know when Covid-19 will be under control. And even when it is … how long will it take for me to get used to being around people again? To crowds? To going out?

What kind of world will we all come back to?

Less than two weeks later, I was furloughed. A word I hadn’t even heard of before, that had suddenly taken over my life. I was projected not to be brought back into work until June, which meant weeks of sitting in my house, isolated, with only doomscrolling to share what was happening in the outside world.

Ironically, in hindsight, I am now aware of how many of us were doing the exact same thing.

I video chatted with my nieces and nephews, I formed a bubble with my parents so I could help take care of them, and yet my husband had to keep going in as an essential worker, and had to put himself at risk. We were extremely fortunate not to actually catch Covid until after the vaccine came out; both of us are immunocompromised, and without being vaccinated, I can only be horrified at how much worse it could have been.

I played a lot of Animal Crossing. I gardened.

I watched dandelions emerge in our yard. I watched over freshly planted lilac and honeysuckle bushes. I found toads in my raised garden bed. I watched birds build nests in the trees in our backyard.

My clearest memory of that time is sitting my living room, my work laptop packed away for the undetermined future, and realizing how quiet it was, in the middle of a weekday. The snow was tentatively gone. The brown yard was slowly turning to green. No office noise, no one out in the street of my neighborhood. Just … quiet.

And I tried to write.

Writing has been a backdrop of my life for … well, for the entire thing. I have always wanted to be a writer. I have always been telling myself stories. But a common theme from both 2014 and 2020 is that I was pretty severely burned out on writing in both time periods. I was still somewhat active in 2014, but in 2020, I was barely engaging with writing at all. It wasn’t until a remote D&D game (inspired by our post-Covid lockdown world) that I started in 2022 that I found that part of myself again.

Arguably, I’m in a worse situation now than in 2014 and 2020. Somewhat. I have more financial responsibilities, and no promise of a date to go back to work. But I can only think on this time with gratitude. For my incredible husband, who has physically and emotionally supported me through these difficult weeks; my friends that have helped me through this; my parents that came and stayed with me, post surgery, to keep an eye on me. And for the time and ability to write.

For the past few years, I’ve been able to take my career as a writer seriously in a way that I never could before. I mean, it’s definitely not the kind of career that could actually pay my bills (wouldn’t that be a neat solution to my current predicament?) but I’ve also come to re-define the idea of a career. In all honesty, it just comes down to taking myself seriously. I’m taking my books seriously, my writing seriously, and myself as a writer seriously. Which means I can do things like keep working on a single manuscript, because I can believe in it. I can email bookstores and libraries until one of them agrees to let me come in and have a party for my own book. I can talk to other writers that I hold in the highest esteem, and we can help each other in our own paths. So this time, now, feels like a gift. I’ll go back into an office at some point (soon, hopefully) and once again put my writing in second place importance; but I’ve spent years writing in my spare time, and I can do it again.

So now, in this quiet spring, all I can do is accept the time I have to do what makes me happiest. And between the rising bird calls and gentle pattering rain, I can hear the click-clack of my keyboard, filling the silence.