Hi, I'm Mike Schubert, the creator of the News Olympian podcast, and I'm here with the person who wrote the book, or I guess I should say the dozens of books about Percy Jackson. Rick Riordan, Rick, how's it going? Going very well. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Got a few questions for you, so let's get into it. First one, it's something that I've wondered for a long time. In episode one, we see Percy getting ready for school at Mary Weather Prep.

Part of the getting ready process for him is getting

his pen rippedide. My question for you is, how does Percy signify to Riptide which pair of

pants to return to? Since it can go back into his pocket, when he change his outfits, is there

something he has to do? Does Riptide just know?

That is a great deep cut fan question. I love that. I love that. You know, I have never

had that question before. So that's really hard to do. I guess it's just whatever pants he's

wearing at the moment. He puts it in and, but you're, you've got a great point. I guess it just knows. Thankfully, it's magic. Yeah, that's the good thing is you can kind of just wave your hand and say magic. It's great. It's fantastic. So what we've seen in these first few episodes, there's lots of stuff happening in Sea of Monsters that didn't really happen in the book. It was stuff that was maybe implied or just alluded to. Are these stories that you have had inside your brain and you've just been waiting and itching to share them with the world for years and years? Or is it something that was like a fun, new writing project? Like, let me kind of restretch and get the old Sea of Monsters' legs back. What if those two is it? Well, I mean, I will say

that it's really nice to have a chance to refresh the story after 20 years and to look at it

and say, hmm, okay, would I do anything differently? Would I sort of change the kaleidoscope to

slightly on this? So we're getting a little bit of a different angle.

That's part of it.

But I think I'm open to different ways of telling the story as long as the story is the same story.

And I think we're ending up in the same place.

It's all really faithful on a macro level.

But getting into the weeds and like, well, is this character

introduced on page 13 or on page 20, and do they have a big part or a little? I mean, that's

something I'm happy to talk about with the writers' room and the showrunners. And I think that it

makes a lot of sense a lot of times to take a hard look at that and figure out, okay, given whatever, 30, 45 minutes,

what's the most effective way to use that time, given that even with the bigger picture of having a TV show,

it's still not infinite time.

So we have to make choices.

...