News

June Update

Hello, demigods, and happy June! This month is named after our old friend Juno, so it must be good, right? Right.

If you missed the cover reveal for Daughter of the Deep, you have to check out the beautiful artwork by Lavanya Naidu:

I am so excited for this book to come out October 5! Hope you will all enjoy it. Stay tuned, as we will be releasing some book tour information soon. If you didn’t catch what the book is about, you can find more info here. 

Also this month, Becky and I celebrated our mutual 57th birthday, which is also our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. As for getting older, I must agree with the old adage: It’s tough, but it beats the alternative (unless you are a god, I suppose, which I most assuredly am not). It’s also not so bad growing older when you get to share the passage of time with somebody you love and have such a deep history with. I am a lucky person!

We have just returned home to Boston from Los Angeles — our first trip west since the pandemic hit. Last year, we ended up buying a place there so we would have a home base on the West Coast. Then Covid happened and we couldn’t come back. It was very strange returning after being away for so long, but I feel so fortunate to be fully vaccinated and able to travel again. We finished furnishing our place. We got to walk around our LA neighborhood. We ate in actual restaurants, y’all. It was amazing.

While in LA, we got to meet our show runners for PJOTV for the first time in person, after working together for a year and a half via Zoom. That was definitely a highlight of the trip! We also had a nice lunch with the folks from the TV studio and a dinner with our agent and producing partners at Gotham Group. Everyone is excited and enthusiastic about the project.

So where are we? Well, if I haven’t been giving you updates as frequently as you’d like, that’s just because there is really nothing new I can announce yet. We continue to work behind the scenes, however, on many fronts at once, and everything is still moving forward. The big piece we are concentrating on now is finding the perfect director to join our team. This is challenging, because that person has to check many boxes:

  1. Are they available? There are so many fabulous directors, but they are all insanely busy on different projects. We have to find someone who happens to have room in their schedule at the same time that we would be making Percy, which is not an easy task in itself.
  2. Are they able and willing to work with young actors? As a middle school teacher, I can appreciate that working with kids isn’t for everyone. You have to have the right temperament and a great deal of patience. You have to be a teacher as well as a director.
  3. Are they someone the folks at Disney can get excited about and feel confident about? The show will be a huge investment. That means the folks at the studio and streaming service want to feel like our director is the absolute best person for the job who can deliver a super show. Fair enough!
  4. Are they someone who knows, loves and understands the Percy Jackson source material? That is critical, for obvious reasons. We know PJO has its own character, tone and personality. We have to find someone who gets that, and who works well with the team we already have in place.

I am confident we will find the right person, but it is a complicated process that involves a lot of meetings, discussions, research, etc. The good news is, once we find that person, that seems to be the last major hurdle before we can get rolling on the project in earnest. Then, at last, we can start getting really serious about other aspects of the planning I know you guys care a lot about, such as the casting process. The pilot script is all set, however, and the season outline is in good shape. I cannot stress enough what a huge “win” that is, and it really did take the better part of fifteen months to get there. When this series moves forward (fingers and toes crossed, of course) I am confident it will be the show we’ve been waiting for.

As soon as I know more, I will update you. Until then, stay safe and well, and keep reading!

Rick Riordan