Letting the brakes off in self-promotion race
Whether you like it or not, promoting your own book is part of the job. Every writer does it at some level. Most writers work very hard at it. There may be different tones, different tactics and different levels of comfort, but nobody gets a free pass. If a book is to find readers, the writer has to help it along.
Curiosity beats over-planning, in my book
For a long time, I thought writing a novel meant knowing where you were going before you began. Plot it out. Understand the structure. Know what happens in the end, and preferably in the middle too. That belief probably delayed me writing a novel by years.
