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| Photo credit: Google Images |
Kinney made
his way through the standing room only crowd to the stage, set with a
table, several bottles of water, a microphone and two
chairs: one for Kinney and one for a translator, so that Dutch-speaking
children could enjoy the event as well.
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| Standing room only, but we were early enough to get seats. |
Things seemed to have gotten lost in
translation before Kinney came to town however since the books are not called
Diary of a Wimpy Kid in Dutch, but Het
Leven van een Loser or The Life of a Loser, and Greg, the main character,
is called Bram.
Kinney was
very entertaining, starting things off reading a greeting to his young readers
in Dutch, which got a chuckle from the crowd.
Then the questions started, which ranged from topics about the book,
what inspired him, his family, even his linguistic skills.
Kinney
dreamed of being a newspaper cartoonist, but after years of rejections, he
decided he would draw the cartoons for a book instead, and the Wimpy series was
born. The first book in the Wimpy Kid series is Kinny’s favorite. The seventh book in the series is due to be
released in November, just in time for Sinterklaas, if I understood
Kinney’s Dutch introduction correctly. Kinney wants to write at least 10 Wimpy
books, and thinks that it’s possible to do even more.
When asked
whether he was inspired by Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series of books, Kinney
said no and that he’d never heard of the books until a couple of years ago,
when, after hearing so many people speak of comparisons between the two series,
he finally decided to look them up.
Miss P asked how Kinney came up with the character Rowley, Greg’s best friend. I wasn’t
quick enough on the draw with the video to get Miss P asking the question, but
I did get Kinney giving his answer.
When asked why
Greg’s age is never mentioned, Kinney noted that this omission was intentional.
Since we don’t know how old Greg is, he never
has to grow up and can always be a wimpy kid.
