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" I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven't done my job. "

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" I stick closely to the structure of the myths. I may have some fun with the mythology by changing the environment to modern-day, but the structure of the myths, the monsters, the relationships of the gods - none of that is made up. "

Rick Riordan

Relationships

Environment

Fun

" If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is a valuable part of your daily routine. "

" It's not easy. I got lots of rejections when I first started out. If you want to write, you have to believe in yourself and not give up. You have to do your best to practice and get better. "

" I have to be careful. My readers are very detail-oriented, and if I make a mistake they'll call me on it. "

" I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil. "

Rick Riordan

Letters

Just

" I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers. "

" I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them. "

" I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading. "

" Turkey, Australia, and Japan are three of my top destinations. "

" I always love it when I hear back from kids who say they discovered Percy Jackson and now wear their learning difference as a badge of honour. "

" It seems like just yesterday my son was hiding under the table to avoid reading. Now, he's writing books longer than mine! "

" I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons. "

" I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination. "

Rick Riordan

Leave

Things

" For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book. "

Rick Riordan

Lose

Book

" There are days when I'll write for 15 minutes and have to give up and move around, and I'll write another paragraph and give up again. On other days I get intensely - focused on the process, sit down at 8 A.M. and won't get up until 8 P.M. "

" I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about 'The 39 Clues', I immediately started going through the 'greatest hits' from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and eras that most appealed to my students. "

" I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers. "

" I saw 'The 39 Clues' as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way - to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive. "

" My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun that they didn't realize they were learning. "

" I go back and research, say, every reference to the Gorgons, and I find what the classical writers said about them and it's so much richer than you might get in an average Greek mythology text. I feel like an archaeologist - I'm dusting off these things that people have not seen for thousands of years and bringing them into the modern world. "

" There are so many fantastic stories and I want to bring Thor and Odin and the other gods into the modern world, just like I did with the Greeks and 'Percy Jackson.' I'll give the books an urban setting and have young people interacting with the Norse gods. "

" It's hard enough to be a middle-school kid, because you're dealing with so many facets of your identity - you're changing socially, you're changing physically, you're changing emotionally, everything is in flux, and to put race on top of that as well and have to figure out your racial identity is extremely hard. "

" Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there's still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us. "

" The Web or card experience is not at all going to replicate the book experience, nor is the book experience going to replicate the Web. "

" It is true that I once refused to eat haggis in Scotland and this did not sit well with the local population. "

" I have a great deal of sympathy for reluctant readers because I was one. I would do anything to avoid reading. In my case, it wasn't until I was 13 and discovered the 'Lord of the Rings' that I learned to love reading. "

" I love Norse mythology - Thor and Odin and Loki - amazing characters. "

" Because I am kind of distracted, I don't tend to sit at my desk 9 to 5. It can be two hours a day, or, when I'm in the final editing stages, it can be 14 hours a day. "

" I've always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write. "

" The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house! "

Rick Riordan

Always

House