Finished the 8 x 10 of the donkey and goldfish. That makes three paintings done yesterday. Not bad. I work well under conditions of extreme terror.

Unfortunately for my productivity–but fortunately for the rest of me!–my natural ebullience re-exerted itself, and I am at least reasonably mellow again. I cannot afford to slack off, as I still need at least three or four more paintings for Anthrocon, and however many for Trinoc, but I’m Zen. In the squishy nuclear reactor of my brain, there are frequent meltdown warnings, the klaxons go off, red lights flash through the corridors, but the problem always corrects itself within a few hours and everything slides back to green. I suspect the brain cells don’t even bother to file out in orderly lines any more. The warning goes off, they get out coffee and put their axons up on the desk.

The Anxiety Creature, bereft of the rest of the chorus, is sulking under my sternum. However, it, too, is fairly mellow. It knows that sooner or later, another pile of paperwork will drop, or I’ll sell a painting that was gonna fill out my space, or I’ll discover I can’t get a mat cut in time, and its hour will come ’round at last, a cute beast slouching towards the zyphoid process to be born.