Percy Jackson's Got Nothing On Me

I told you I was going to rant about Percy Jackson and the Olympians and I totally am. The reason is, there seems to be a very prominent theme at the moment in movies and books that use Greek Mythology. Now, I don't know when this all started before it actually got popular, but that's just how it all tends to work. I mean, we've been on this stupid vampire kick for a while now. It is how it goes. We always have these trends in movies and books. We are all hoping this vampire thing ends soon.

Anyway, I was talking to my mom about my book and she was asking questions about it. She was wondering about my use of Greek Mythology and wondering if I was cutting it kind of close with all the myths that are going around right now. That's actually a very big concern. If I get in on the trend too late, I look like a knock off. If I come in on it too early, no one wants to read it because they don't have an interest. Then again, I'm taking on a genre that doesn't really get much attention. I'm hoping to change that.

Here's the benefit to using Greek Mythology as inspiration and not directly. I am taking the characters that i develop and linking them up with a myth or god or goddess. For me, this gives me something to compare it to. Greek Mythology created so many major themes in literature. You can't really escape them. There was love and revenge, there was adventure and tragedy. It took the conventional idea of god or gods being all-powerful, all-knowing and perfect beings and turned them into nearly human creations. They did the worst things. They fought with each other and betrayed each other. They fell in love and fell out of love. It was an amazing concept for an ancient culture to have developed. That is why I fell in love with it and that is why I chose it to use it as a base. I'm not taking stories directly from mythology, not completely. There are definitely parallels between my plot and characters and those found in mythology. However, there is nothing new under the sun, as they say. Everything will have come from that in the first place. So, I decided that seeking inspiration from mythology was a good way to make sure that I was hitting very human driven plots.

As for Percy Jackson, I must be the biggest nerd ever. I basically watched the movie and corrected the mythology the whole time. I understand that the author, Rick Riordan, gets creative license and I respect that. I felt like maybe there were things that could have been portrayed better. Unfortunately for me, I haven't read the books yet, but that is on my list of things to do because I'm dying to know how he approached most of mythology. Some of his ideas on the use of gods seemed a little off, but that still could have been the movie and not the actual books. We'll see. I was basically able to predict the entire thing because of the myths that were present and I could figure where it was going because of that. I felt super cool, even if it was super nerdy. It wasn't great, but that's what you get for making movies out of books. I would suggest you go see it if you like mythology. It seems to make more sense that way.

Cross my fingers that I get some work done tomorrow. I need to develop two more characters and I should be able to get writing. The first few captures should be easy enough, its going to be the rest of them when I need to know where Julian is going that I have to wait for my map to be finished. I'm so excited to get that finalized and looked at. Have a great night!

LL&P