Things I've learned as a novelist

 I've written three novels and two novellas. It takes a long time and it's very taxing on the body to write for that long. I've never written a 100,000-word novel, but I've written up to 97,000 words. Here are the five things that I learned from writing novels:

1. Outlines matter
2. When you finish the novel, it's the first draft!
3. You can order a galley or an ARC copy before publishing
4. Outlines really, really matter
5. Start out writing short stories, then gradually increase the word count