Like everyone else, Jeff Kinney has been struggling with working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The American author of the best-selling Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series has an unusual solution: He drives to the cemetery and writes there instead.

"It's a place where there's peace and quiet and nobody really bothers me," says the 49-year-old over Skype.

During lockdown, he managed to finish a screenplay for a Disney+ animated feature and the manuscript of a new book.

"When I started writing, it was cold, so I sat in my car, put a blanket on my lap and tried to write on my iPad."

He says with a chuckle: "It's an unusual place to try to write comedy."

Kinney lives in Plainville, Massachusetts, with his wife Julie and their two teenage sons.

Normally, he keeps a gruelling, year-long schedule that has to run like clockwork. It includes two months of globetrotting for book tours and two months where he draws for 16 hours a day.

This has enabled him to put out a new book every year for his wildly popular children's series, in which self-important tween Greg Heffley recounts his daily adventures through diary entries and doodles.

The pandemic has very much slowed things down, though this has allowed him to spend more time with his family.

"In a way, it has given us the gift of time," he says. "I learnt that I was moving too fast and that things were moving too fast for my family. My son's only a year away from going to college. It was nice to get off the train."

He also learnt to value his bookstore, An Unlikely Story, which he and his wife run in Plainville - and which, like bookstores around the world, had to stay shut during lockdown.

"Now that it's been taken away, I can see how badly our community needs it. So I'd really like to get back and open it up again, drawing crowds of people when it's safe."

Kinney is now back on the road, having embarked on a socially distanced book tour for his latest book, Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure.

This involves him driving a van to independent bookstores across the United States and handing out books to kids, using a 2.4m gizmo shaped like a trident.

Recalling the first day of his tour, he says: "It was on a really busy street corner in New York City. Every so often, a person would walk by on the street and I'd have to wait to use my trident to grab the next book. It was messy, hot and fun."

He adds: "The kids were really happy. We're living in a weird time when everybody's wearing masks so I'm not seeing their faces, but I can hear their voices and sometimes you can tell when someone's smiling with their eyes."

Kinney's books have sold 250 million copies worldwide and are a regular fixture on The Straits Times' weekly children's bestseller lists.

A multi-millionaire, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2009.

A former computer programmer, Kinney began publishing Greg's adventures on FunBrain, a children's educational website he managed, in 2004. By 2007, the series had been picked up for print and his first book, which took him nearly eight years to bring to light, was an instant hit.

Greg, an arrogant, un-athletic kid trying to navigate the minefield of middle school, is partly based on Kinney's own childhood. In contrast, Greg's best friend Rowley is sweet and imaginative, if not very bright.

Rowley's perspective takes centre stage in Diary Of An Awesome Friendly Kid (2019), which came about when publisher Scholastic asked Kinney to write a 50-page story for schoolchildren in the US, and then World Book Day organisers in Britain asked him to double that.

"I liked (Rowley's) voice," he says. "I love writing Diary Of A Wimpy Kid books, but they're very technical and there's a template for them, whereas there isn't for the Rowley books, so I feel like I can go in just about any direction with those."

Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure is "a story that feels like an epic fantasy, but it's written from a place of pure imagination".

Kinney has just finished the manuscript for the 15th Wimpy Kid book, The Deep End, which will be released in October. "I've done about two-thirds of the sketches and from now until the end of August, I'll just be drawing like mad."

He describes it as "Covid-19-adjacent". The book starts off with a family quarantined in their grandmother's basement because their house is being renovated.

"The family go through all of the beats that families are going through right now - the feeling of being together in close quarters, not being able to see your friends, the parents are working at home.

"But it doesn't address Covid-19 head on. I think that kids will be tired of hearing about Covid-19. I think it's inescapable right now.

"Also, I want a kid picking up one of my books 10 years from now, to feel the book is still relevant. I didn't want to put a stamp on this moment in time. I really like my books to feel timeless."

• Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure ($23.54) is available at bit.ly/RJAFA_JK

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