Today was insane.

This morning, in no particular order, I roughed out a cover (which is due in a week–I had two, but we spent a valuable week dithering over whether to put Nazis on the cover, since it’s about ghost Nazis, which is the sort of thing I could wish would be ironed out before I get a two week deadline, since the initial idea had to be scrapped and I had to dig through photos of WWII battleships to work up this version) did a rough for a very nifty commission, finished another page of “Digger” since I gotta put out two a week–I’m good through December, but I’d like to maintain my lead–painted a bloody sigil on another cover (also due in a week, again, due to their timing rather than mine), finished up a bit of work for the VCL, and picked up the layouts for yet another project–this one’s for a European animation studio, which got dropped in my lap two days ago, and which involved chatting for a good hour this afternoon with their art director over what they were looking for.

Whew. I am not afraid of hard work–otherwise I wouldn’t have been an artist–but even for me that’s pretty nuts. And it’s looking like that’ll be status quo for the next week, particularly since I’ll be working on the pieces for the animation place in the evenings. More details about that as I do more work and get a better feel for the place–hate to jinx it, and you never know how things are gonna work out–but it’s interesting stuff, and it looks like it may pay decently, so I hope it comes through. I have never aspired to be involved with animation in any fashion, (and I’m certainly not cut out to be a production artist of any sort!) but hey, I had also never planned to do a webcomic or have art on the side of a dog grooming van or a middle-aged-woman-finds-herself novel. You just take these things as they come, and see where they go…

On the bright side, as many people have learned before me, the surest cure to feeling blah is working like a dog. A working dog. Maybe a sled dog. One of the ones in that…race…thing…starts with I…thing. So I feel fairly cheerful. Frazzled, but cheerful. And faithful Money Frog came through, yet again, and so all is right with the cosmos for as long as my energy holds out.

It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.