I’m slowly emerging from what may have been one of the most intense, busiest periods of my working life — particularly the last month or so. It’s been very frustrating, to have so much going on, and to not be able to write about most of it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences over the past few months, and come the fall, I hope to be able to lift the veil of secrecy somewhat.
I can say this: one of the joys of the past six months or so has been working with people who give a damn about what they’re doing. This has not always been my experience in recent years, with publishers and so on. But both with the album cover and with the children’s book, I had the great good luck to be collaborating with people who were genuinely focused on the quality of the end product.
And I’ve just received an advance copy of the actual, physical, published kid’s book, and I couldn’t be happier. When you’re in production on something like this, there are a million details you have to work out, and even when you’re working with good people it seems like you’re inevitably going to miss something — but the Mayor turned out exactly as I’d hoped. I really couldn’t be happier with it.
The book, which I wrote about in more detail in this post, will be available in stores in September (as will the PJ album — it’s going to be an exciting fall). And there are pre-order links on the very official Very Silly Mayor placeholder homepage.