If I sound a bit emotional his month it's because I've just been saying farewell to my new book, Teacher's Pet. It's out in the big wide world now, standing on its own 191 pages. I've asked it to be polite and to remember its manners, but sadly my books don't always do that. So if a copy comes to visit you and behaves in a way that causes you to gasp, or laugh so hard your chocolate milk comes out your nose, please don't be too cross with it.

If you'd like to sample a bit to see if your nostrils are up to it, click here to read chapter one.

To celebrate (OK, publicize) the publication of Teacher's Pet, Puffin Books are holding a Morris Gleitzman Quiz. The prize is $6000 worth of Puffin books, $2000 worth for the winner and $4000 worth for their school. I got very excited when I heard, but then they explained I'm not allowed to enter.

The people who'll have the best crack at the prize will be people who either (1) have read all my books or (2) have a group of friends who've read all my books between them or (3) can thumb through my books really quickly in a library or bookshop. That could be you! You can find out more about the Morris Gleitzman Quiz, and enter, by clicking here.

Sadly this quiz is only for people who live in Australia, for legal and logistical reasons I don't completely understand (I'm not even sure what logistical means), but if you live somewhere else, I'm working on it. I'm encouraging my publishers in other parts of the world to have their own Morris Gleitzman Quiz. More details later, I hope.

I should also confess something else to those of you who don't live in Australia. That big wide world I mentioned at the start, the one Teacher's Pet is bravely experiencing for the first time, is for now just the big wide world of Australia and New Zealand. But TP will be arriving in Britain early in 2004 and other countries after that.

If your bedside lamp has just blown up or the cat has eaten your torch batteries, good news. Teacher's Pet is also out on audio cassette and CD. If you'd like to hear me read the first chapter, click here.

New audio cassettes and CDs are also out this month of several of my other books - Misery Guts, Worry Warts, Puppy Fat, and Belly Flop read by me, and Blabber Mouth, Sticky Beak and Water Wings read by the magnetically-voiced Mary-Anne Fahey. The first chapters of all these will be added to the Morris On Audio section throughout this month. If they're not all there yet, they will be soon.

That's all from me for now, because I have to go and do what authors do when they have a new book out – travel, talk, dust the shelves in bookshops, that sort of thing.

I'm starting off in Western Victoria. From May 7th till the 10th I'll be speaking at the libraries in Stawell, Horsham, Warracknabeal, Dimboola, Casterton, Heywood, Portland and Hamilton, sometimes by myself, but mostly with the wonderful Stephanie Dowrick.

Then I'm at the Reading Matters conference in Melbourne on 15 and 16 May, and the ALEA Conference in Perth on the 17th. On Sunday 18th I'll be meeting Perth readers at the Bookcaffe in Swanbourne at 6pm for a couple of hours of food, wine and chat - all free, Penguin tell me. You can book for that on 03 9811 2374. And then I'm off to the Northern Territory for three weeks, so if you're a NT person you'll have to live in a community of less than about three people for me not to be visiting you. Details from any public library in the territory.

Hope to meet you, either out and about, or in the pages of Teacher's Pet.

Till next time, oo-roo and happy reading (and quiz-entering)

6 May 2003