The Sorority of Jason Grace is cooking, y'all!
Seriously, I am finally on the finishing bits of Sister Who Wasn't, the first/TLT instalment, and the first chapter should be up, dare I say it, within two weeks?
I'm committed to end of August at the latest, but with the worst/biggest hurdle finally done, I am feeling much more confident that I won't be completely rewriting earlier chapters in these final sections.
So that's very exciting, and hopefully no one is interested in a PJO story with Jason Grace as the MC (which I'm assuming since A03 is pretty much crickets).
I have very very complicated emotions about people reading what I write lol.
Anyway, things are moving along well, 232k is fully written and I have 1 mostly written and 3 half written chapters to finish. Everything else is done done done.
Have a zero context snippet:
Jason and Annabeth stand very very still as the King and Queen of Olympos start snarling at each other in Koine Greek.
“Did you know? Tell me for once and for all! Did you know about the other?”
Hera throws her hands in the air, her body vibrating with rage. “You didn’t tell me you broke the oath! How am I to be your Queen if you don’t tell me what foolish thing you’ve done now?!”
“Did you know?” Zeus’s voice drops to a deep rumble that shudders through air.
A dangerous sort of rumble.
Hera rolls her eyes. “Of course not, you twit! If I’d known I wouldn’t have taken such severe measures!”
“You swear this?”
“Do we not have enough problems with oaths?”
“Swear by my heir.”
Hera’s hands jerk up, clenching reflexively, as if she wants to throttle her husband. She snarls out, “I swear by Apollon Latoios that I did not know. I learned when you did.”
Clearly infuriated at having to swear by Apollon, son of Leto, she then throws a curse word at Zeus that makes Jason and Annabeth flinch.
It draws the gods’ attentions and Jason struggles to stand straight under their scrutiny.
Zeus scowls, lightning crackling over his clothes and face the longer he looks at Jason.
Then he turns on Hera once more, a finger pointed straight at Jason. “You stole him from me!”
If Hera were any less proper, she would be spitting as she screams. “I kept him safe! Why are we fighting over this, yet again? It’s not the first time I’ve done this, you fool! How many of your children have I saved from the courtesans you bedded!? You idiot! Use your head for once in your life!”
Jason has never regretted learning Koine Greek more.
Zeus roars back, making the air itself vibrate. “Did you know he was the child of the prophecy when you took him? Did you take her too?”
figured out my process for actually making/posting my rewrite
im gonna get all the notes for pjo, and the general basic notes for hoo (and anything else i need),
then im gonna post pjo, and between each book itll probably be a week or two wait,
and while working on pjo im gonna get all the specific details for hoo, and after pjo theres gonna be a month-ish long wait until i start posting hoo,
and while posting hoo im gonna work on the notes for the kane chronicles, and post that a month-ish after im done with hoo,
and take notes for toa and mgca at the same while posting tkc bc they take place at the same time, and i might post them together in chornological order (as their own seperate fics still) but idk abt that right now
I am feeling lazy and have been saving my linguistics rants for the actual story. I am still obsessively correcting mistaken Greek and Latin, because, well I am an autistic nerd. But I also wandered off into Linear B for a bit, and yet it is actually plot relevant.
This thing has become an academic thesis disguised as fanfic. And I have no shame about this.
So, copying and pasting the current status of what I am now relatively confident will be a 23 chapter final fic.
And yes, I am screaming into a void and well aware that there is a reason there are so few Jason-centric fics on A03. There are even fewer ones with skyfam or Protective Zeus tags. And well, I had not planned those last ones, but a Myth Accurate Zeus regularly invited himself over to annoy his demigod kids, at least the interesting ones, so... Yeah. I have lost the plot.
Current Status as at 11 July 2026:
The first seventeen chapters are finished. Word count is 186.7k across these finished chapters.
17-23 are unfinished chapters, with 23.5k already written between them.
Only two of those chapters have less than 4k in them. All of them are outlined and I am only stuck on a couple of scenes. Naturally, they would be the final fight scenes. Because, of course.
The story is fully written all the way to the tour of the Underworld.
The first 75.5k cover Jason and Annabeth's first five years at camp. With a lot of world building and essential events. Luke's quest among other things.
The next 38k run from the Summer before the bolt theft, and cover everything up to and including the capture the flag game and claiming. Plus fall out.
Then two chapters/20k on post claiming, issue of quest and prep for quest.
65k written for the quest, with another predicted 30k-ish to write. That's everything from them leaving camp all the way to returning the bolt to Zeus. So around 90-100k will be just be the quest.
Final two chapters are both half written and cover what was the final chapter of canon.
So, final length will still be 245k-250k, which is bloody insane for The Lightning Thief, but it also has a much heavier focus on the quest.
My original goal was to go through canon with a fine tooth comb and indulge in as much nerd-heaven and 'correcting mistakes' as I could. I am aware I am still working on how to write the active/adventure bits so it was intended as a lot of practice.
I am quite pleased I did actually find enough things to write about. 11 of canon's 22 chapters are dedicated to the quest. And given I was also needing to cover the 75.5k of time before said quest and a hell of a lot of world building… Yeah, I am stupidly verbose, but also content with reaching my goals.
Please note, insane word counts are not a comment on anyone else's ability or lack there of to babble endlessly. I am insane. I am aware I am insane. I am enjoying indulging in allll the words and not needing to restrict myself to 5k word essays. Word limits were the bane of my existence when I did academic-related things.
Anyway. Basically. I need 3-10 decent writing days and this thing will be finished. Then it needs a read through or two, a bit of editing, and I'll be able to whack the first chapter up.
in my rewrite theres two years between the titan and giant wars and because of that percy doesnt lose the curse of achillies,
i imagine for his entire life hes wanted a tattoo, but never actually thought itd happen because at first there were money and gabe issues, and then he had to deal with the war, and then he thought he was gonna die- and now hes invulnerable so he cant get one, but it still is on his mind constantly, leading him to desinging one and refining that design over the course of the few years (artists percy ily)
and so near/at the end of the giant war where he somehow learns about the little tiber, he choses to go through it no questions asked no hesitation,
and then he immediately goes to get a tattoo.
and when he tells people hes planning on getting a tattoo, if they arent sally, paul, annabeth, grover, thalia or nico, they assume hes gonna get a somewhat small one. he hasnt felt pain in 2 years so itll probably take a bit to build back up his pain tolerance but it is still percy-
but again, this is percy. and so instead of getting a small tattoo like a normal percy he gets a tattoo all on the right side of his body that starts o his face (barely noticable, just on the side of his chin), that goes all the way down his arm, and all the way down his leg. front and back
i dont have much of an idea for what the tattoo is actually like, but i dont think itd be (fully) ocean themed…
but basically he gets a big-ass tattoo as his first tattoo after not being able to feel pain for 2 years,
and then he lets sally and paul (the people i mentioned earlier) design smaller tattoos for him that he gets like. within a week. after getting the first one.
part of this is because he is activley seeking out pain because its percy. but honestly he could be doing a lot worse
he just really likes tattoos and i mean the gods are paying for them so. why stop.
also hes gonna die in like 4 years so really who cares
Is it still being written?
Yes. You betcha. It's now at 167.5k and I have so much still to write for the TLT instalment.
Why is it taking so long?
Well, let's see, in the past two days I have rabbit holed on: The Greek letters Χ (Chi) and K (kappa) and how Latin didn't have a similarly wide variety of keh sounding letters and this eventually led to Kronos and Chronos becoming the same. The history of sword making from the bronze age through to the iron age. Roman use of steel. The disproven 'solely mythological' Orikhalkos (it was real. It's a type of brass.) Every single piece of myth I could find on Tityos. Various myths on Iris. Who actually made Poseidon's trident, which remains ambiguous because the trident exists in myth/history looooonnnnggg before anyone recorded it's forging. Where adamantine comes from. The word play of the greek μεδεα which means two very very different things...
Yeah, basically I am going under in academic research and having the time of my life. In between all that, the story continues to be written, but it's probably the most heavily researched thing I have ever written, and oh does that say something about my postgrad work LOL.
I am also just using this as an excuse to see what happens when I go all out on the research and over-verbosity, and hopefully get it out of my system before I go back to my other two projects.
I'm having fun, and the work is continuing, it's just taking a lot longer than planned because I'm no longer writing and more spending hours every day chasing every new factoid I come across.
Since SoJG is the story of an Athena kid and a pseudo-Athena kid just call it method writing? I can be an Athena kid! Totally!
This is purely a rant on my part, so I'm going to start with the disclaimer that I genuinely am all for people using artistic license and writing whatever they feel like, Writing based on vibes is how we get awesome fics with completely wild premises that are a glorious adventure from one end to the other.
But I am also someone who subscribes to a certain philosophy. It's attributed to Picasso, but probably wasn't said by him, which doesn't change my love it.
Learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.
Which is why I want to have a lil rant about the PJO fandoms perpetuating claim that demigods can understand modern Greek because it's the same as how an English speaker can understand Shakespearian English with a little effort. I also regularly see the claim that Roman demigods can understand Italian.
The language of Ancient Greece and modern Greek are not mutually intelligible. At all. How do I know this? Hi, I’m diaskedasilexis and for my sins, I spent several years studying university level Koine Greek and Ecclesiastical Latin.
In Percy Jackson & the Olympians, RR makes it blatantly obvious he has no understanding of the languages of the ancient world. He also relies on other people to do the Greek and Latin translations and whoever he's using is 100% screwing with him. There is no way so many consistently terrible translations could exist otherwise. It starts with Anaklusmos, Greek gods and demigods shouting 'di immortales!' and then it just keeps getting worse.
But, RR does establish some basic rules.
Mainly that Greek demigods possess an innate understanding of 'Ancient Greek'.
Very early on in The Lightning Thief, we have Percy reading a 'few lines' of Homer.
Homer's works, the Iliad and The Odyssey, are written in what is now labelled and defined as Homeric Greek. Also called Epic Greek. It is a unique combination of several Archaic Greek dialects to create something that is both poetic and utterly beautiful to read aloud. It sounds incredible and is a piece of art in and of itself.
They are also written in the 8th C BCE, in a time when the main language of the area is what we now call Archaic Greek.
Going back to my own skill-set, I am trained in Koine Greek, the language that came after Archaic Greek. Koine means Common. Koine Greek was the common tongue and by the 3rd C BCE it had become the international language. It continued to be the international language right up until the 6th C CE. Romans who travelled outside Rome proper often learned Koine Greek as their second language.
English as a distinct language showed up somewhere around 5th-6th C CE, right when Koine Greek's popularity was tailing off.
To give you a breakdown of the length of time between languages:
Shakespearian English to Modern English used today: 420 years
Koine Greek to Modern Greek used today: 1426-2326 years
Homeric/Epic Greek to Modern Greek used today: 2776 years
Homeric/Epic Greek to Koine Greek: 500 years
Look at those numbers again.
The claim that an Archaic or Koine Greek speaker can speak Modern Greek relies on the language having minimal changes across 2800 years. In a little over 400 years, language has shifted enough that Shakespeare is a slog for most people. English didn't even exist 1700 years ago!
Yes, Koine Greek and Modern Greek do use an identical alphabet. Just like English and Vulgar Latin (the common tongue of Ancient Rome) also use the same alphabet.
That means nothing.
And that's not even getting started on the fact we lump multiple forms if 'Latin' under a single category and I keep meeting English speakers who claim that Latin and Italian are mutually intelligible.
There is a vast difference even between Latinitas (the speech of the good families aka Latin for Rich Ponces), Vulgar Latin (common tongue, the one with the best rude words and where the English word vulgarity comes from) and Ecclesiastical Latin (the language of the Church. It applies an Italian-esque pronunciation to Latinitas grammar and yes, it's as weird as it sounds).
I'm not what I would call fluent in Koine Greek or Ecclesiastical Latin. For all I have studied them at university, the focus was etymology not instinctive fluency, I can read both, and I can mentally translate them faster than most. I cannot speak either and constructing a sentence will still take me an hour or more. But I also struggle with English grammar, so the fact I can read them but not speak/write them isn't entirely surprising.
I am not an expert, and I am still super new to fanfics. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. But I do adore research and have an unending need to info dump on everyone else.
Next time you sit down to write a new awesome fanfic, if you're going to play with languages (and you totally should, it's awesome), take a minute to remember just how long ago Ancient Greece was, and if you want your characters speaking modern Greek, please, for the love of the gods, don't claim they do it because they can speak Archaic/Koine Greek. You have a glorious world filled with magic and a god of languages and communications. You have so many options.
Though, honestly, whatever you do, it still won't ever reach RR's interesting translations. From virtually every attempt to include any form of Archaic/Koine Greek up to the Latin form of the Prophecy of Seven which has the enemies of the state carrying decorative trinkets to the door of death. And there's Anaklusmos. Which... Never mind. Let's just say the translations are questionable as a whole and stick with calling the sword Riptide.
And I think that's it for my judgey pet peeves series. I am aware I'm the only one likely to be so bothered by this, and I would be a lot more okay with it if canon actually had decent translations, but instead the issue just keeps compounding.
After reading your latest posts, I 💯 predict that there will be a new archeological or anthropological discovery. And when asked about, the person will say they only wanted to write fanfiction. The research was only to write a more accurate fic. They didn't mean to accidentally piece together this breakthrough. It was only supposed to be a labor of love for the fandom.
To be more serious, thank you for all of the research you do. It makes for such interesting world building and compelling glimpses into actual Greco-Roman mythology. Your fics are some of my favorites.
Aww thank you! I am very much enjoying info dumping on people!
Though I'm afraid my years in academia are now well behind me. While my area of study wasn't Greco-Roman myth it was... let's say tangentially related. But before university and too many degrees and essays, my first love was the religions of the ancient world, and now, *mumble* decades later, it is easily accessible on the internet and I can immerse myself in all of it from the comfort of my home.
I do so love the age of the internet!
I'm so glad people enjoyed Weirdest Prophet! The Sorority of Jason Grace is an ongoing challenge to balance the academic with the funny, and it is yet to be seen if I will succeed LOL.
Thanks again!
AKA: Why Homer and Ovid are not the same, and claiming that they are is as ridiculous as saying Beowulf, Lord of the Rings and the Hail Mary Project are the defining texts of Christianity.
This has been on my mind frequently as I keep researching things for the Sorority of Jason Grace, and spending a lot time wandering through the Percy Jackson fandom.
Creative writing is new to me, but academia is not. I am all for people using as much artistic license as they want, writing based on vibes or asking 'what if' and running riot. It's awesome, and I love it.
I also have a pet peeve about authors who say they didn't use artistic license and this is entirely correct and proper because [insert x] said so. When it comes to PJO writers and Greco-Roman myth, the [insert x] is often Euripides, Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid.
And it occurred to me that very few people understand where Greco-Roman actually comes from. Which led to me realising that the easiest way to explain the issue is with this statement:
Claiming that the works of Ovid and Homer are the same story and discuss the same myths is the same as claiming that Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings tell the same story, and that both are defining texts of the mythology of Christianity.
(Before someone decides to yell about me calling it Christian myth, please look up the theological definition of the word 'myth'.)
For the 0.2 people who may be interested, here's the breakdown on why:
We group all Greco-Roman myth into a single big mush of texts. Chronologically, it usually starts with the works of Homer & Hesiod (contemporaries writing around 750BCE-ish) and carries all the way through to Nonnus' Dionysiaca in 450 CE. Many also include John Tzetzes who was writing in 1150CE-ish.
If you didn't catch it, those dates are in BCE and CE. There is 1200 years between Homer/Hesiod & Nonnus. That's one thousand and two hundred years.
We are also missing the Actual Religious Texts of Greco-Roman religion. What survived is the popular mass media, especially the plays that people loved the most, and not the no-doubt precious scrolls kept within the temples.
If we wanted to replicate this for the mythology of Christianity and bring it to modern time, this is what it looks like.
The year is 3602CE and in a university somewhere in the galaxy, a lecture titled 'The Primary Sources of Christian Myth' is about to begin.
After a brief introduction about the difficulties in analysing the texts of Christian myth because the authors constantly contradict themselves, a list of the texts that will be studied this semester is provided to the students.
These texts are:
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales
Paradise Lost
Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
Hamlet
Henry Boyd's English translation of The Divine Comedy (aka Dante's Inferno)
Gulliver's Travels
Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows
Twilight
The Da Vinci Code
Hail Mary Project
Yes, I'm serious. If you are staring at this list and already drafting your rant, let me remind you; Ovid is rolling in his grave over being wildly described as an author of myth and not the subversive author writing scathing political commentary that he actually was.
(I love Ovid, I genuinely do, and I hate that we no longer acknowledge why he was writing. And if you cannot see why I would consider both Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Ovid's Metamorphosis to be political works critiquing absolute power, authoritarianism, totalitarianism and corruption through the lens of popular fiction, then I beg you to re-read them with a much more critical mind.)
Each of the texts listed references Christianity or has Christian themes.
Now, the Bible wouldn't be included in this university course because, like with the Greco-Roman texts, the Bible was just so well known, a copy was never added into the 'highlights of Christian myth'. After all, why would anyone need to preserve it? It's just a given that people in the future would have a copy. Right?
Conflating Homer and Ovid is the same as claiming that Lord of the Rings and Beowulf tell the same story.
