Clik here to view.
OUT OF OFFICE AUTOREPLY – back soon(ish)
We’ll be somewhere near here. Naturally I can’t give really specific details or the paparazzi will be lurking in the bushes hoping to glimpse us. I’m taking a little time off. Back soon. But first a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A NEW YEAR’S HONOUR for The Book of Everything
The poster for the Melbourne Theatre Company season.We just heard that our production of my stage adaptation, The Book of Everything , made the New York Post’s summary of Top 10 Shows for 2012....
View ArticleClik here to view.
GONE FISHING – back soon
All quiet at Telunas Beach. I’ll be out of town again for a few days, leading a writers’ camp at lovely Telunas Beach in Indonesia’s Riau Islands. It’s one of my favourite places, and one of my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
CYCLING BY PROXY – other people’s fun
I’ve just ridden across France, up the Alps and then the whole length of New Zealand. It only took me a couple of weeks and I hardly raised a sweat. Because I did it by reading. My own cycling...
View ArticleClik here to view.
2b or not 2b@hamlet #TWITTER MURDERS ENGLISH! OMG!!!
Are texting and tweeting, online chatting and emailing destroying people’s ability to write good English? Or is resistance to change in the language coming from a few pedants who still want to see a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE: Future Tense. I can feel it coming…
This is going to be huge. Somehow I just know! Right, I’ve got a start. Now I just need a few characters, a setting, a plot, some kind of theme… Add a bit of dialogue and away we go! ACT ONE, SCENE...
View ArticleClik here to view.
HELP! My blog is under attack!
It looked innocent enough – a comment, albeit one with grammatical mistakes, telling me in glowing terms how great my site was and asking for my advice about how to set up a blog. It turned out to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BREWONGLE YOUNG WRITERS’ CAMP
The Brewongle Young Writers. I’m somewhere in the middle, trying to look less crazy than the others. I took a day off from rehearsals of The 13-Storey Treehouse. You may well have heard more than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
FROM PAGE TO STAGE – thoughts on turning books into plays.
Although kids’ books can be bestsellers, it’s notoriously hard to get serious mainstream media attention for children’s literature. Only a few times a year do our major Australian newspapers run...
View ArticleClik here to view.
THEATRE REVIEWS – praise be to bloggers and tweeters!
Alison Bell, Matthew Whittet, Peter Carroll and Claire Jones in The Book of Everything. Photo: Heidrun Lohr. Writers are a needy bunch. Releasing our work into the world begins with vanity, hope or a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
FREE BOOKS AT MELBOURNE BUS STOPS
I love the idea of these pop-up libraries at tram and bus stops in Melbourne. It took me (and others) a little while to realise that the books were real. And free. Well done, bookworld.com.au –...
View ArticleClik here to view.
TAKING A BREAK – BACK SOON
Quiet, beautiful, and with very limited internet access. The ideal holiday destination. Writers don’t do holidays very well, but I’ll be taking a short break from work, blogging, travel and almost...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
THE LEGO MOVIE – it’s okay to play
This could be the start of something very big. Hundreds of people have spent a good part of this decade in dark, windowless rooms, doing tedious, repetitive, painstaking, frustratingly detailed work....
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
HAPPY OLD YEAR! NEXT, PLEASE!
Blue Mountains National Park, NSW, Australia Trawling back over thousands of photos (there are lots of shamefully clumsy ones and I don’t inflict them all on family, friends or even blog readers)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
GONE TEACHING, BACK SOON…
Not a bad place to have an office. It’s become a regular Lunar New Year excursion for us – first to Singapore, then on to run a Writers’ Camp at lovely Telunas Beach in the Riau Islands. The huts look...
View Article