Much to my surprise, I managed to whip through the first draft of a project far faster than I expected. I revised the sample chapter on Tuesday, got an enthusiastic thumbs up from my editor and went right to work.Now to be fair, the project is a mere 8000 words long and when I finished the draft a short while ago, it weighed in at 10,200 words. There’s room to edit and polish, tightening things as we go. Best of all, since this is intended to be a heavily illustrated work with captions plus this text, there’s some wiggle room. It’s off to a beta reader right now and I am putting it aside until Monday or so since the deadline isn’t until August 24.This frees me now to polish the piece for Star Trek Magazine since my editor, bless him, actually read it while supposedly on vacation. That’ll take a short while and then it’s finally time to complete the Green Hornet short story which is actually a tad overdue.The nice thing about delivering the large research project to DC is that they take some time to absorb it and I am free to tend to all of this before I get the green light to begin writing for them. I’ve been making the most of that time, as you can see, and am feeling pretty good about where I am. Best of all, I can take all of tomorrow to work at DC and not feel guilty about not writing.Along the way, I’ve also been in touch with people about the Howard Chaykin Retrospective which is the main focus of my time once the Hornet is delivered.On the one hand, I’m being very productive and making all of my masters happy. On the other hand, the freelancer looks at the shortening To Do list and gets worried the work will dry up again. The trick is to avoid the tiny voice of panic, stuffing it back into a dark corner of the office until he really needs my attention. After all, there remain proposals out there being evaluated, stuff being approved at the licensee and other irons in the fire.My work with Avalanche Comics Entertainment also keeps me occupied as we reach the halfway point of the latest project (again for Microsoft) and are already beginning contracts on the next one. And then there’s the consulting I’m doing for a start-up that has been very quiet of late and looks to be ramping up again later this month.See, that little voice can be ignored. For this month, anyway.