An exciting envelope arrived the other day.

Yes, it was from Chronicle Books, the world’s finest publishing house, the makers of things beautiful and thoughtful and funny and nice to touch.

Yes, we were excited.

Really excited.

Really, really excited.

Now, before you get too excited, we should say that the envelope did not contain finished copies of our book. That won’t happen for several more months, at least. This envelope contained the color proofs. The actual illustrations printed on the actual paper with the actual printer with the actual inks that will be used in the real, live book.

It was the first time we were seeing the layouts on paper. When done right (and Chronicle always does it right), images printed on paper look so much better than they do on the screen.

For those of you who are familiar with our classic, home-brewed version of Ten Thousand Stories, you might notice that the title page illustration below is new.

Working with our editor, we added a bunch of new content to the Chronicle version: an introductory letter, a mini-narrative (the tumultuous tale of grandma and her horse), a section of thumbnails of each of the stories and images, to name a few.

For those of you who do not know, when a book is printed, multiple pages print on one huge sheet of paper that are then trimmed down afterward.

For those of you who do not know, I am terrible at using Robbi’s camera, hence many of the photos I take end up rather blurry.

Drooling with delight over the quality of the printing and the paper, we heartily approved the proofs. Which means our book is being printed at this very moment. It’s a thrill we still can’t quite grasp.

Did we mention that this sucker is being published by Chronicle F!@#$G Books?

The mind reels.