Honestly, there's not much I'd do differently.
Mostly because it would contradict the very thing I write about. And I write about how everything that happened to me was necessary. For the experience that helps me later.
How can you learn to walk, or to write, without practicing. Without making mistakes, falling, and getting up again.
Everything that happens is a puzzle piece, and after a while those pieces form a picture.
Three years ago I started writing. And if I honestly go looking for even one mistake along that path — I won't find one. Not because everything went smoothly, but because every step turned out to be necessary, in exactly the order it happened. I took my first book through an editor — I searched, waited my turn, then worked with him for about two months and got two rounds of edits. That cost both money and time. But that exact path is what gave me an understanding of how editing actually works from the inside — what matters in a text and what doesn't, where an author goes blind to their own mistakes, and where the editor is simply right.
Without that first experience — with a real, live editor, with the waiting, with the money — what came next wouldn't have happened. My husband, watching all this from the sidelines, started building a service for self-editing and proofreading — editroast.com. He built it mostly out of curiosity and a wish to help me: so I wouldn't have to spend money on editors when you first have to find one, choose one, wait your turn, and then wait another couple of months for two rounds of edits. The service was ready right around the time I finished the second book — we tested it on that one. Then I ran the first book through it too and edited it all over again, far more thoroughly than the first time.
So no, I wouldn't have done anything differently — even if I could. That first path with the editor wasn't only needed for the first book. It was needed so I could understand, firsthand, why writers — and editors too, for that matter — actually need a tool like this. That's exactly the kind of puzzle piece that only makes sense in hindsight.
The story with the editing is just one example that's easy to trace: something was inconvenient, and out of that inconvenience a solution grew. But that's how everything in writing works. And in life too. Everyone has their own path and their own length of it — some people take a year to reach their book, some take ten years, some circle through a completely different profession before they sit down to write. None of those steps is ever wasted, even if in the moment it looks like a waste of time, an inconvenience, or a dead end. We just can't see the whole picture at once — it comes together later, out of the small steps we took without knowing exactly what they were for. And maybe that's the whole point: you don't need to see the entire mosaic to trust each of its pieces.