Author name: Cosette Verga

For the past month, my life has revolved around a story. Not in the casual way people mean when they say they’ve been “working on something,” but in a way that reshaped how I moved through the world. I ate inside it. Breathed inside it. Slept with scenes replaying behind my eyes. I lived in a constant state of immersion—editing, rewriting, imagining, fixing, smoothing, replaying moments again and again until they felt inevitable. The story wasn’t something I visited.It was where I was. Every quiet moment belonged to it. Every spare thought folded back into a scene, a line of dialogue, a glance I wanted to sharpen or soften. I carried the weight of plot holes like unfinished conversations. I smoothed rough edges the way you smooth the hem of a garment you care about, again and again, because you want it to feel right when it finally leaves your hands. Living inside a story like that is one of the most extraordinary feelings I know. The characters stop being fictional in any meaningful sense. They become familiar presences. Family, in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding dramatic—but it’s true. I know how they breathe. I know what they would never say. I know what breaks them, what steadies them, what they’re afraid to admit even to themselves. They walk with me through my days. They sit beside me when the house is quiet. They matter. And then—suddenly—it’s time. The moment arrives when there is nothing left to adjust without breaking something. When the story is as honest as you can make it. When the only thing left is the hardest part. Letting go. Hitting send doesn’t feel like publishing a file. It feels like releasing a piece of my heart into the world and trusting it to land somewhere safe. It’s relief and grief tangled together. Pride braided with fear. A deep exhale followed immediately by a held breath. Because once it’s sent, the story is no longer only mine. And afterward, there’s this quiet. A strange, echoing quiet that settles in once the constant hum of creation stops. The mental noise fades. The scenes fall still. The world that held me so completely goes silent—not gone, just no longer speaking directly into my ear. That quiet is unsettling. My body doesn’t know what to do with itself yet. My mind reaches automatically for the next scene, the next fix, the next problem to solve—and finds empty space instead. There’s nervousness there. Vulnerability. A raw awareness that something deeply personal is now being read, interpreted, held by others. This is the part no one warns you about. The in-between moment after devotion and before response. After immersion and before reflection. Where you are proud of what you made and terrified at the same time. Where the world feels oddly distant because your inner one just shifted. Releasing a story is not a single act—it’s a transition. A crossing. A quiet grief for the version of the world that belonged only to you, paired with the hope that it will mean something to someone else. Right now, it’s quiet.And I’m nervous.And I’m proud. And all of that can be true at once.

This isn’t advice—just my story. I didn’t mean to publish a seven-book series in one year.It wasn’t a plan.It wasn’t a strategy.It just… happened. I always wanted to write a book. Stories lived in my mind for as long as I can remember—worlds made of magic and love and danger, characters who felt more real than people I knew. When I was seventeen, I started collecting pieces of one of those worlds. Not a manuscript. Just fragments. Images. Moments. Names that wouldn’t leave me alone. But life isn’t always kind to dreamers. And somewhere along the way, that part of me learned how to go quiet. To tuck itself away. To sleep. Then, nineteen years later—on May 7th, 2024—seven months after a life-altering choice where I finally chose myself—that dreamer woke up. Not gently.Not slowly. Ideas surfaced all at once, and then they poured. I opened the Notes app on my phone and started dumping everything out—characters, storylines, magic systems, emotional arcs. It went on for weeks. Everywhere I went, the story followed. While driving. While shopping. While cleaning. I wasn’t creating it so much as uncovering it, like it had been waiting patiently for me to be ready. Fated, my first novel, was where I learned—in real time—how to write a book. Mistakes and all. In the beginning, I revised it again and again, but I never truly rewrote it. Not from scratch. Not from a distance. I shaped it while still inside it—still becoming the writer I am now. Even today, I can see the beginner choices I might make differently. A cleaner structure. A sharper rhythm. But I can’t bring myself to erase what’s already there. Because that book holds something sacred. It holds the moment I first learned how to listen to my characters. How to trust emotion over perfection. How to begin. As my writing grew, the story grew. And I grew with it. The writing became part of the story. But believing in the story didn’t mean the world would, too. I queried seventy-five agents.Every single one said no. And honestly? I don’t blame them when I look back at that original manuscript. But even then, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: This story needed to exist. So I kept going. I chose self-publishing—not as a backup plan, but as a promise to myself. A promise that I wouldn’t abandon the story just because I was still learning how to tell it. That choice didn’t make things easier. There were long nights staring at drafts, convinced it would never be good enough. Days where I questioned whether anyone would ever care—whether all that time, all that heart, was being poured into silence. There were moments I wanted to give up—not because I didn’t love the story, but because I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to carry it. And still… I kept going. Writing stopped being something I made time forand became something I had to do. It wasn’t just need—it was the quiet thrill of wanting to be back inside the story,every spare moment tugging me home. Scenes wouldn’t let go.Mornings began mid-sentence.Days were shaped around getting the words out before they disappeared. Fated took the longest to write. By February 2025, I was finally ready to publish—and Awakened was already nearly finished. But the version of Fated I released then looked very different from the version that exists today. Because in the months leading up to—and even after—publication, I didn’t just write a book. I studied writing.Storytelling.Structure.Emotion.Pacing.Voice. I consumed everything I could—not because I wanted perfection, but because I had a story I wanted to honor. I wanted to tell it well. After Fated released, I went back into it again. And again.And again. Nights of revision. Hours hunched over Word documents, reshaping sentences, reworking scenes, applying techniques I was still learning. Somewhere in that process, I fell in love with a breath-based style of writing—letting emotion dictate rhythm, allowing white space and pauses to carry as much meaning as the words themselves. By the third revision of Awakened, I was dreaming in Word docs. Narrating my life in my head. Completely consumed. But there was joy in it, too—the kind that makes time slip sideways when scenes click and the world narrows to words and breath. And I wasn’t driven by productivity or deadlines. I was driven by the need to finish telling a story that arrived when I was finally ready to carry it. And then—after the book was out in the world—the rejection took a different shape. There were reviews—some fair, some not—that I read at two in the morning with tears in my eyes, wondering if maybe they were right. But the story didn’t stop. I kept writing through the doubt.Through the noise.Through the learning curve that came with putting a book into the world on my own. Then came everything else—the logistics of self-publishing, marketing, formatting, learning an entirely new industry—all while still drafting the next book. Restored came in April.Reckoning followed in July. And with every book, a part of me healed. Fated dives into themes that lived close to my heart—feeling unworthy, forgiveness, hope after loss, redemption. Writing those stories wasn’t just creative work; it was personal. Each book closed a chapter inside me, even as it opened one for the characters. By the time I published Reckoning, something shifted. I stopped rewriting endlessly.I trusted my voice.I understood my style.I felt confident. July was when I finally let go—when I stopped holding the books so close, stopped trying to perfect them in private, and decided I was ready to let them exist in the world as they were. And that’s when things started to change. I began building a review team.Running promotions.Gathering readers. And then one day, I opened an app and saw someone reviewing my book—talking about how it made them cry, and laugh, and feel. I was at a circus with my family that day. During intermission, I ran to the car—and on the way, I opened TikTok. Someone was raving about Fated for three