How Rick Riordan wrote a new Percy Jackson while working on the TV show

2023 is a banner year for the Percy Jackson series. Rick Riordan’s book series about a boy who learns he is the son of the Greek god Poseidon is getting adapted as a TV show on Disney+. On top of that, Riordan just released Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods, the sixth mainline book in the series.

This book is about Percy Jackson’s adventures during his final year of high school. The book even begins, “Look, I didn’t want to be a high school senior.” That’s a callback to the line of the first-ever Percy Jackson book, 2005’s The Lightning Thief: “”Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.”

“Percy’s like that,” Riordan told ComicBook.com. “He’s going to give you the wink and the nod and he’s going to give you Easter eggs. If you have never read a Percy Jackson book, you might just read past that and not think much of it. But if you are a longtime fan, of course you’ll recognize the echo from The Lightning Thief and it’s just Percy’s way of saying, ‘Boy, here we go again. I’m a senior and I’m still dealing with this stuff!'”

Rick Riordan wrote a new Percy Jackson book as “a thank you to fans”

At first, Riordan proposed a new book as a way to entice Disney to make a TV show. It ends up he needn’t have bothered — they were interested regardless — but after the show got going, he couldn’t get the book ideas out of his head.

“Why don’t I try to write this first one, The Chalice of the Gods, the one that I had sort of initially outlined as kind of a thank you to fans,” Riordan remembered thinking. “It would be really an interesting challenge for me to write another Percy Jackson book after all this time. We’re here with the TV show reinventing Percy Jackson that way. Why not also go back to the roots and reinvent him in book form as a love letter to all the people that have been waiting all these years for a good adaptation.”

"I didn’t know how it would be. I certainly was worried that after 14 years I might not be able to get back into that kind of mindset. But as it turned out, Percy is so much part of me, so much a part of my family’s history. I spent so much time writing about him that it was really pretty easy, as easy as it ever is to write a book to get back into that voice. It was like a reunion with old friends."

So Riordan ended up writing the new book while he was working on the show, helping usher in a rebirth of the Percy Jackson series. “I found that they dovetailed very nicely. One informed the other,” he said. “As I was writing Percy’s point of view in the book, it helped me remember the dynamics between Percy and Grover and Annabeth that were first explored in The Lightning Thief, which was helpful when I was reading scripts and thinking about the lines the actors were saying. At the same time, the show was sort of already kind of breaking down on the story into its component parts. I found it was actually a really good exercise to do both at the same time.”

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods is available in bookstores now. The TV show, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, premiere on Disney+ on December 20.

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