One of the things people enjoy doing on Twitter is celebrating milestones. Follower milestones are a huge thing but a lesser thing are the number of tweets you have. This morning, I noticed that I was only 5 tweets away from my 10,000th tweet.

Now, it may be silly, but I felt the need to make it something memorable. But, of course, as soon as I thought that, I was overcome with crippling tweeter’s block. When you look at the screenshot below, you’ll notice it too me 20 minutes to stop spazzing enough to actual write my 10,000th tweet.

So I finally just tweeted something I said to my parents the other day after I saw The Muppets in theatres as my 10,000th tweet and it was immediately retweeted by someone which made me feel validated as a human. In case you were wondering, my 10,000th tweet was:

The Muppets have a new movie, My Little Pony & TMNT are popular again… I hope you’re all enjoying this world I created with MY MIND!

Which seemed appropriate.

But this is the part I actually wanted to tell you about. Continue Reading »

I know how it is. You’ve been meaning to grab a copy of my newest play, Daddy Issues, but you kept forgetting. Well, now you really have no excuse.

While the play is normally a mere 99 cents, from January 9th through 13th, you can grab the whole thing completely for free. That applies no matter how many people download and you don’t even need a coupon or anything fancy. Just follow this link and the whole play will be yours in a few clicks.

Download a copy for yourself and then make your father grab one too. (This play is a real Dad pleaser.) Heck, get all your theatre buddies to snag a free copy or every random person you know! No matter how many copies go out, the entire play is still free to anyone and everyone during this 5 day promotion. Pretty neat, huh?

Don’t have a Kindle? Here’s how to read your free copy on your computer, cell phone or tablet.

Oh and if you do take advantage of this free copy promotion, I’d greatly appreciate your taking a moment to write up a brief review of the book on Amazon!

But, remember, you only have until Friday the 13th to take advantage of this offer so you should probably go grab your free copy right now before you forget again.

Now that the new version of The Love of Three Oranges is street legal, you may be wondering what the difference is between Oranges: Classic and Oranges: New Hotness.

To start with, I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. There really isn’t any such thing as the “original version” of my Three Oranges. To start with, we changed some of the script during the rehearsal process so the show the actors read at auditions and the final show that we performed were both different. Secondly, between curtain call of our final show and when the book was published in 2002, I made some changes and tweaked some scenes that I never really felt worked as well as they should. So the version that has been for sale all these years wasn’t even truly Oranges: Classic as it had already been modified a few times.

That said, while the majority of the play is the same, there are some changes in the new edition that anyone who’s read a previous version will likely notice. Most of it is just smoothing out of dialog and other general writing tweaks but the most fundamental changes all come under the head of… sensibilities.

Carlo Gozzi wrote his commedia dell’arte scenerio for an audience of adults. Off-color humor was absolutely the order of the day. I wrote my play for an audience of college kids and the off-color stuff still fit right in.

Fast forward to 2002 when my Three Oranges is in print and is becoming increasingly popular with high schools who love the ensemble cast and historical teach-ability of the show but cringe at some of the off-color stuff. School boards, religious schools, PTA’s: this play has managed to tick all of them off over the last decade. I was repeatedly asked for a “school friendly” version of the show and that version was already in the works when Playscripts came into the picture. Rather then have two competing versions of the show out there, I decided to clean up what I could and then just write alternate cleaner scenes that groups could have upon request.

I want to say from the start that I didn’t want to change the spirit of the show and sanitize it beyond recognition and it truly hasn’t been. I refused to change more then I actually changed. But there were a few parts that needed a little tweaking and I think we achieved some fantastic compromises to keep both student and adult groups happy.  Continue Reading »