The way that I would do the puzzles is very elaborate. I believed in the story and I knew I had to finish it. I was still working full-time jobs during that time, but I would work on and off and sometimes set it aside for as much as a year, but I'd always come back to it. I worked on Ready Player One for almost a decade. At the same time, I wasn't going to let anyone rush me. Nothing will light a fire under you like getting one of those phone calls, and I knew fans were waiting too. He would call occasionally and ask if it was done. So I knew everybody would even be going into this story with expectations, including me and including Steven Spielberg. Once it became more popular I would see people who heard it was so great from their friends, then they would go into it with expectations. The great thing about my first novel was that nobody knew who I was and people could discover it. The higher your expectations, the more you're setting yourself up for disappointment. I know from my own experience - like with the Star Wars prequels - that expectations are often resentments waiting to happen. It did give me a huge amount of anxiousness going into writing it.

I had to then stop and do and now I've been working on it nonstop for the last two years. So it was hard to think about anything else once I was there. It was also great because I was in the Stacks - on the set of the movie - in this recreation of things from my imagination. So that motivated me and it was great because as we were finishing the movie, Steven started to ask me questions about what the sequel might be about so he could get that into the ending of the first movie. And if there's no book to base the sequel on, then that won't stop them.

Also, I knew then there was like a ticking clock because if the movie does well, then they're going to want to make a movie sequel. That's when I started to really write the sequel.

I don't think I really started writing until they started production on the movie, which got me back into living in the world of Ready Player One. As I was finishing the first book, and I knew the first book was going to be published, ideas started to formulate in the back of my head. ERNEST CLINE: I tried to set up the possibility of a sequel when I wrote the first novel.

Armada book 2 ernest cline