Oh hey! It’s been a busy spring/summer/what season is it again? Recently, it occurred to me that I haven’t been keeping folks up to date on recent things I’ve had published around the interwebs, so here are a couple posts people seem to have found useful over at Litreactor.

The first has the clickbait-y title of “10 Mistakes I Made As a Debut Novelist“–basically because in the year or so leading up to the publication of my first novel, I clicked the hell out of links like that, but I still did all of these things. If your first book is set to drop sometime in the foreseeable, consider yourself forewarned.

One of the most remarked-upon items on this little list was “Assuming friends of friends would help.” Yeah, you know what they say about assuming…

On the other hand, the more time that passed since the publication of that novel, the more I realized there really were some things I did right. Unlike the items on my first list, these things were things I found in the sort of clickbait-y listicles that offer advice to debut novelists.

But those lists are so long that no human being could ever possibly do everything on them. (Still, being who I am, I tried, and to a certain degree, still am. What season is it again?) The items on my list, “10 Things I Did Right As a Debut Novelist,”are the things, out of all of those things, that actually made a difference. (Like, say, keeping my website up to date, as per this post.)

Debut novelists, learn from my mistakes! Benefit from my (hard-earned) insight! And keep on rockin’ in the free world. We need your voices and visions now more than ever.

XX

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SD