What if your book isn’t actually as impossible as it feels right now? I’m not saying it’s easy. I know how big writing a book can feel. 🥺 But sometimes we look at: I need to finish the whole manuscript. And our brain hears: 😵‍💫 DO EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. 😵‍💫 No wonder we avoid it. Instead, what if we looked at the path? Where are you right now? 🤔 Maybe you have an idea. 💡 Maybe you have 20,000 words. Maybe you have half a manuscript and haven’t touched it in a year. Maybe you have pieces everywhere and don’t know how they connect. Those are different starting places. And they need different next steps. You don’t need to solve the entire book today. 📖 You need to understand the part of the path you're standing on. Then we can ask: What needs to happen next? That’s the kind of conversation I love having with writers. ✍️ Because sometimes the book stops looking like this enormous impossible thing and starts looking like something we can actually work through. 📚

For years, I thought I needed other people to see my value before I could fully believe in it myself. I experienced being judged, misunderstood, and affected by other people's expectations of who they thought I should be. Instead of need other people to see my value, I truly believed in myself. Example: other people did not believe that I will learn Swedish language. Not Swedish people, but Croatians. I don´t judge Croatians. But I´ve met good Swedish people they have me a positive motivation I felt. That´s why that country felt like a relief for me. After 2-3 years, I was able to communicate Swedish language- that was progress for me, no matter how I speak, no matter what other people say, no matter how do I sound in that foreign language- For me, that´s self confidence. There were periods when I had very little external evidence that I was “successful.” While living in Sweden, somewhere along the way, I started asking myself a different question: What if I choose to believe in myself before other people have a reason to applaud me? I started talking to myself differently. “I am good enough.” “I am capable.” “I love myself.” "I am confident" Not because everything around me had suddenly changed. But because I realized, that if I allowed other people's opinions to become the measure of my worth, they would be designing my life for me. My journey—from Croatia to Sweden, through uncertainty, difficult relationships, work, rebuilding my life, learning, investing in myself, entrepreneurship and eventually becoming an author—taught me that self-belief isn't about pretending everything is going to work. It's about continuing to take responsibility for your own life on own terms, even when the outcome isn't visible yet. And this is something I explore much more deeply in my real story. I wrote it from lived experience—not from a "perfect" life, but from the inner battles, decisions and lessons that shaped me. I'm curious: Have you ever had a period in your life when you had to believe in yourself before, anyone else could see what you were becoming?

This might be terrible marketing. 😂 But I don’t want you believing that you can only write when I’m there. I want to support you. I want to brainstorm with you. I want to help you see where something isn’t working. I want to ask the questions that help you go deeper. I want to help you keep moving when the book starts feeling huge again. And throughout that process I want you to become more confident in making decisions about your own story. Because someday I want you to finish that book and think: I did that. Not: Dani told me exactly what to write. ✍️ And if another book starts calling you afterward? I want you to approach that one with more trust in yourself than you had when we began. Maybe you still choose support. Great. 😊 There’s nothing wrong with having people beside you. That's what I love! 💕 Having people beside you to help you expand as a writer. ✍️ Support should help you grow. It shouldn’t make you forget that you're the writer. ✍️

My name is maya nova, i'm new in the community

During my first read-through edit of Nigredo Manifesto, I noticed something that made me laugh. In one chapter alone, I found seven different uses of “looking back.” At first I thought, okay Rose, we get it. You are looking back. 😂 But the more I noticed it, the more interesting it became. “Looking back” wasn’t just repetitive wording. It was an orientation phrase. While I was writing my own life, especially difficult parts of it, I was constantly placing myself somewhere between then and now. “Looking back” helped me create enough distance to see the experience, interpret it, and put it into language. So yes, I’ll probably rework a lot of those sentences during editing because the reader doesn’t need to be reminded every few paragraphs that the narrator is speaking from the present. But I’m not mad at the phrase anymore. It may have been scaffolding. Sometimes repetition isn’t only weak writing. Sometimes it shows you how the writer was able to approach the material in the first place. Now that the story is on the page, I can remove some of the scaffolding without removing the perspective that made the writing possible. Has anyone else found a phrase they apparently leaned on a lot once they started editing? 😆📖