I think the reason I write for kids, first of all I think a lot of adult books are boring. I don’t want to write a boring book. I want to write a book with say shipless pirates or lots of pickles or talking Star Wars puppets.
And so, I want to write a book that’s got awesome stuff in it and for unknown reasons adults — a lot of adults don’t want to read a book that has awesome stuff in it. And so I want to write books that have awesome stuff in it and it just so happens the kids are the only ones that are smart enough to read those books, so my books are kid’s books.
If adults loved cool stuff and nerdy stuff and Star Wars, well of course there are a lot of adults that love Star Wars books. And thankfully some of them have found my books too. Yeah, so I just want to write about cool stuff and it happens that when the publisher sees the list of stuff I’ve come up with, they say, “Oh, that’s a kid’s book.”
I have always been reading kids books and I never stopped. You know, when, when other people are like, “Oh I’m reading Hemingway,” or whatever, you know, I was still reading The Furious Flycycle. I remember — I don’t know if you’ve read The Furious Flycycle, I remember bringing it to school and the other kids were like, what are you reading. And I was like well I got tired of getting bored and stuck with books. I wanted to get out a book I knew I was going to love.
So I guess I was in high school or maybe eighth grade and I was reading this, you know, second or third grade book and everybody else was like what are you doing? And I was like, “Man this book is awesome.” And I actually went back and read The Furious Flycycle again just a couple of weeks ago and it really is awesome. It’s a fantastic book.
And there’s a lot of books I’m excited about now. A couple that I wish I had had when I was kid. Of course I like Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants and there’s this new series out called Fangbone, I love Fangbone, I just I’d had come up with the idea. Fangbone is like everything you could want and its little graphic novels. Great stuff. But, you know, a book with some pictures and, you know, fliparoma like Dav Pilkey has in Captain Underpants, that’s how you win me over.
