Goodreads asked Brandon Alsup:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Brandon Alsup I am certainly still an aspiring writer! I do believe I have taken a crucial step that many people struggle to get past, I know I did, but I am no sage. However, I have learned a lot by plodding through the experience of going from idea to publish. Some advice I offer is: don't think you are going to write a masterpiece for your first book, or your second, or your third... I had already come to grips with this piece of advice during my music composition days, "you aint no Stravinsky," so I feel I was a little more open to just writing without to much pretension.
The other nugget of advice I give myself for my next book is: "be more original and wild". When I started Engineer Zero, I thought, "I will just write a simple YA book that follows all the tropes of the genre." Come to find out, it is not simple to write a book, I didn't know all the tropes of the genre, and in the process I realized I had set out to write a book I didn't want to write. Not that Engineer Zero is so outside the YA genre or anything, but I could not write the "simple cliche book" I thought I could. For example, in my first draft I had Aris going to school because Twilight did it, Harry Potter did it, Divergent kind of did it... I had scenes where she got dressed up for school and learned things from a professor and met the cute boy ect. I figured out that was not the story I wanted to tell; Engineer Zero shifted away from that. For my next book I will spend more time coming up with more original ideas and more adventurous scenes because I have more confidence in my ability to create story out of it.

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