• Intelligence is weaving multi-faceted motifs through your narrative that bolster your theme. Wisdom is knowing only 10% of your reading audience will notice or give a damn. Being a writer is doing it anyway.

• Reading comprehension and knowing how to read a recipe are not the same thing. I learned this the hard way, people. Don’t make my mistakes. Take your cues from “Lord of the Rings” tavern meals and put the cookbook down.

• Dialogue and prose don’t have to look identical. Your prose is in your voice, but dialogue is in someone else’s. One exercise I use when editing is picking out lines of dialogue from my own work and trying to see if I can guess who said them without context.

• Reading is good for you. It’s good for learning empathy and it’s good for honing your writing skills. Find time to read during the day the same way you find time to write: a paragraph at a time, in between tasks, in pieces and sometimes in the sly.

• Pet peeve: I cannot stand seeing two uses of the same stand-out vocabulary word close too each other. If one chapter uses “serendipitous” twice, then they’d best be referencing the same thing. It was most certainly not a case of serendipity they ended up there.

• I’ve changed a character’s nationality before because I found the perfect name it didn’t make any sense for them to have. But only, like, once. Or twice.

First Writer Confessions since getting back online! Alas, there is always more shame to unpack. Sometimes shame disguised as advice. And sometimes advice disguised as shame. Happy writing, everyone.