Armored Piercing Operations

I surpassed 1170 pages for AP4 and there's still a lot more to write. I have no doubt I will break my 1200 pages record I made with AP3's first draft. It's crazy that I've written so much over the years, but it's sad it took me over 7 years to reach this point. AP3 took me 3 years to write. I think the hardest challenge with AP4 compared to the rest of the series is keeping track of all the plotlines. There's a story you see at the forefront and another story that's in the background, but that background story has a huge impact on the main story. AP3 will be a huge effort to edit for publishing, but AP4 will be a bigger monster.

I've been working more on AP4 than AP3 lately, even though AP3 hasn't been published yet. I finished my 1st draft for AP3 in 2014 and started the current draft for AP4 in 2017. It will near 8 years since starting AP4 and I really want to be done with it soon. AP1/AP2 have been my most successful and most reviewed books to date. I don't want to keep fans waiting for so long, but this series is very hard to write for in comparison to one-off books like Nibowin: The Island of Death or The Raid of Hotel Laurier.

I surpassed 1100 pages for AP4. Things story-wise are moving at a fast pace. But one of the most difficult parts of writing this book is how complex the story is. There are a lot of moving parts and I've made many notes to keep track of different storylines. I keep forgetting details from early on in the book and I think I'll have to reread the whole book before finishing it. Maybe I'll write a blog about how hard it is to write a book with multi-level storytelling. Even AP3 will be tough to finish. My outline for changes for that book is about 17 pages now, and that only covers the first 300 or so pages. If I ever work on a different series, I'll try to keep it simpler to make it easy on myself.

I'm very close to publishing a new book soon. After that, I should probably spend more time on getting more AP books out. I've been going back and forth on whether I want to make spin-off books. I'm not keen on doing prequels, but it could bring more eyes to the series. I dunno.