I just cut down my first boy from my first grow. With all the great advice here, it wen't great. The leaves were happy, the roots were massive, white and smelled fresh. Just follow the tutorials, and you don't even have to be exact to get good results.
If you haven't tried cloning, you can make a bunch of clones to experiment with. I took a little shoe box sized bin, filled it with nutes and put in bubblers, and sat clones in it. The bubbles splash enough to wet the bottoms of the grow cups and the little ones are groing like crazy. You can see pics on my "Greetings from Southern Oregon" grow, NICE roots after just two weeks.
You can do this.