A TREEHOUSE TRIBUTE

James Lee as Edward Scooperhands, the ice-cream dispensing robot.

Apologies for my absence from cyberspace during the past weeks. I’ve been busy with matters theatrical.

The epic national tour of The 26-Storey Treehouse ends today, in Wagga Wagga*.

I want to use this post to pay tribute to the fabulous work of the cast and crew.

MY NEW BOOKS, MY OLD STORIES – released today

I believe it’s called a ‘shelfie’ when an author takes photos of his own books. Technically this feat should be performed in a bookstore, ideally in front of a major display in the shop window. I’m in the wrong country for doing that, so I had to put my advance copies on my own shelf.

I’m hoping people will judge my new books by their covers, because these ones look terrific, and they’ve been released into stores and online today.

Thanks, Terry Denton, for the fabulous illustrations. And thanks, Random House, for rejacketting and republishing these collections. They were originally published in 2008 and sold respectably then. But in this throw-away, disposable, short-attention-span world, any author should be delighted when his books get a rerun.

For those who can’t nip into a bookstore in Australia to buy hard copies, they are available online or as downloads. You can find them with a click HERE and HERE. Cheapskates can even read a sample story for free.

Excellent Christmas presents for 5-10 year olds!

THE NEW PLAY – seriously funny

Coming very soon…

The self-inflating underpants fail to blow up. The rehearsal stops. It’s not my problem; I’m just the writer.

‘The underpants inflate, almost smothering Terry’ says the line in my script. Somebody else will work out how to make them do this. There’s a team of talented, dedicated professionals in the rehearsal room, and they’re taking those self-inflating underpants very seriously.

Because creating The 26-Storey Treehouse: Live on Stage is a serious business.

BACK IN CYBERSPACE AND BACK IN THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

Happy New Year! We’re diving straight back into it here, with The 13-Storey Treehouse returning to the Sydney Opera House after a sell-out season there last September/October.

Nice news too that the show has just been nominated in the Sydney Theatre Awards as Best Production for Children. And I see that Andy Griffiths’ and Terry Denton’s The 39-Story Treehouse was the best-selling Australian book of 2013. That’s not ‘best-selling children’s book’; it’s ‘best-selling book‘ – a fantastic achievement. So naturally there’s pressure on to keep the crazy plays coming.

A workshop of The 26-Storey Treehouse is next and I’m looking forward to working with the great production team.

The promo video above includes a few clips of the play, and the ‘creatives’ (don’t you like that word?) saying nice things about each other and the show.

The 13-Story Treehouse will tour Australia during this year, playing in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide as well as regional towns. For the full touring schedule, CLICK HERE.

And for those able to catch the madness in Sydney, bookings for the Opera House in January can be made HERE.

This shameless self-promoting plug is now over (if you don’t do it yourself, who else will?) so I can wish everyone a great 2014!

CRY ‘HAVOC’ AND LET SLIP THE FLYING CATS!

Luke Joslin is Superfinger, the greatest hero in the history of Handkind!

Okay here we go! It’s more than a year since I began working on the stage version of The 13-Storey Treehouse and this week we finally start performing it.

We can hardly wait.

MY NEW PLAY – in the Sydney Opera House

Curse you, Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton! How can you be so irresponsible, apparently chucking random words and incoherent stories into books with hastily scrawled drawings, and yet be so damn successful?

You are among Australia’s and the world’s best-selling authors and illustrators, but your plots are sadly thin, your characters have neither depth nor development and your stories have no uplifting, educational messages for young readers. And they’re totally impossible to adapt for the theatre.

It must seem oh so easy to you. You just write in a book: ‘suddenly along came a squadron of flying cats, a mermaid, a sea monster, hundreds of monkeys and a giant gorilla.’ I bet you have a good old giggle thinking these things up.

Then some poor playwright like me has to work out a way for it to all happen, live on stage, twice or even thrice a day, with barely time to sweep up the broken glass between performances.