Best advice: don't play at all, you'll get addicted and it'll eat up about 2200 hours of your life until you no longer have time to play.
That's if you're like me, anyways. If you reach cannibal/tragonis like status, you'll be putting on 8000+? hours. That's about 333 days. Almost a year of playing SK, excluding eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, leaving the computer at all... yea. I think D has like 15k or so by now. That's just his actual login, too- I doubt that includes the time he actually spent doing the nitty gritty coding.
Barring that, I would suggest finding a circle of character friends in the game. The kind of friends you would feel comfortable just sending a tell to for help/advice/etc. It's important to stay involved and connected to the game world. You'll get a small fraction of the amount of potential enjoyment you could otherwise if you don't check out what's going on in the mainsteam world. Don't interpret that to mean that you should exclude your own little events and such, however.
Don't play into the hype that stats are everything. Most of the advice I see here are stat related. Life might be a little rough if you're very skewed statwise, but you should get the hang of things and do an ok job by the time you finish leveling. Just play and don't plan ahead so much at this point- you'll start kicking yourself for "poor" stat choices earlier which in the long run is quite meaningless.
*****
And yea, if Slayne ever beats you up, just go
say ooc: yea, but at least i don't lag out in PK.
He'll get it.