Show don’t tell Writing Podcast: Episode #60. In conversation with Author Lidija Hilje (Part 2)

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In part two of this conversation with Author and Book Coach Lidija Hilje dives into how she structured her book to span 20 years using a dual timeline. She and Suzy talk about how to use sensory showing details in literary fiction in order ground readers when you need to ‘tell’. Finally, a round of quickfire questions about her writing journey rounds out this riveting interview!

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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)

Suzy V.: [00:00:00] Welcome to Show. Don’t Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We’re gonna explore writing techniques. I’m gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers’ careers that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

And I’m also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you’re just starting out, you’re drafting your first book, you’re editing, or you’re currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show’s gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn’t even know you needed, but you definitely do.

I’m so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, [00:01:00] and you’re gonna also have some fun doing it. Let’s dive in.

Welcome back to the podcast today, Lidija Hilje. This is part two of our amazing conversation about her brand Spank and new literary fiction book called Slanting Towards the Sea. We talked so long about this book and how she created it, and she shared so much with our listeners. That it’s actually two episodes.

Lidija is a book coach and author of literary fiction and before becoming a novelist, she was a practicing attorney at law spending her days trying cases before Croatian courts. Lidija’s non-fiction essays have been handpicked by Medium’s editorial team, and featured on the Medium homepage, which earned her the title of Top writer in fields of psychology, self-awareness, personal development, self-improvement and more.

Most recently, her personal essay was published in the New York Times’ Modern Love Column. She lives in Zadar, Croatia with her husband and two children, and when she’s not writing her coaching writers, she can be found [00:02:00] sipping coffee with her husband. On one of her hometown’s, piazzas we’re scrapbooking and buying too many books with her girls.

Lidija’s debut novel Slanting Towards the Sea just came out in July of 2025 with Simon and Schuster. It’s being released in both the UK and North America. Let me read you the blurb about it. This is an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous novel, and we’re gonna talk about it slanting towards the sea. Spanning across 20 years and one life altering summer in Croatia.

Slanting towards the sea is at once. An unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself. Ivona divorced the love of her life, LA Ho. A decade ago, they met his students at the turn of the millennium when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise.

But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguish Evon dreams. One after another, and a devastating secret forced her to set him free. Now La Ho is remarried and a proud [00:03:00] father of two. While Avon’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father, bewildered by life’s disappointments.

She finds solace in reconnecting with La Ho and is welcomed into his family with his spirited new wife Marina. But when a new man enters Zonas life. The carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline.

Slanting towards the sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love. So in the last episode, if you missed it, we talked about what makes a book literary fiction versus genre fiction, what the book is about, how she said it in her home, Croatia, and why.

And what she hopes that readers will take away. In this episode, we talk a lot about craft. We really dig in. We talk about how she managed to structure the book to span 20 years, which is a really [00:04:00] difficult thing to manage. The passage of time we talked about. Showing details, her show don’t tell and how, what differs in literary fiction and how she managed to take some of those summary scenes.

We talk about scene craft and how it’s different in literary fiction and how she managed to take some of those scenes and make them feel like showing even though maybe technically they’re not. So then we have some quick fire questions here where she shares some behind the scenes on how she got started in her career.

This episode is one not to miss. I hope you really love it as much as I do. Switching gears for a second. The book spans a 20 year span, and again, we talk about strategies for taking the simplest way and taking a more advanced way. That’s an advanced technique to be able to put 20 years into a novel.

Like the simplest thing is to send it over three days or something, right? And to kind of drain the well dry about everything that happened. How did you set that [00:05:00] up in terms of, I mean, there’s a lot that we could talk about structure in this book, but managing the passage of time is something that beginning writers struggle with.

So how did you do it? How did you skip around? Or

Lidija H.: we can definitely talk about structure because there’s an interesting story about how this structure came to be in terms of managing time. I think the big issue for writers, and I’m coaching writers myself and soul, I, I can see this in real time with my clients as well, is that when you’re spanning a longer period of time, the rider gets bogged down in, in trying to put the protagonist on the bus and show each stop, if that makes sense.

Whereas you need to like dip and pull just the tenfold scenes. So don’t get, get to show them. In every single stage of this 20 year period, you get to choose tenfold scenes and then you get to show them and you know, you [00:06:00] have to also be careful with details so that the reader has the inconspicuous journey.

When they’re, you have to ground them, ground them in time when you’d open a new scene. I didn’t use the, the time tag. Yeah, time stamps. Yeah.

Suzy V.: Is timestamps are lazy and readers don’t read them anyway. If you’re into it, you’re not gonna read them and process them. I don’t, unless I’m editing. You also need to ground us and, and use, and you’d used a lot of things to show the passage of time gives spoilers, but there’s, you know, some younger characters that make it obvious when they’re.

Babies, toddlers, those things like you use different mechanisms to ground us in time, which is awesome. Okay. What’s the

Lidija H.: interesting story of the structure? So, when I started writing this story, the bulk of the story, the, this is a dual of timeline story. So it has, it does span 20 years, but it also happens in the present storyline.

It happens over a course of a summer. And so, and then there’s

Suzy V.: [00:07:00] flashbacks,

Lidija H.: and then there is basically, there’s a dual timeline. And when I, you know, the, that takes you from the past to the point where the book starts and shows you how these characters came to this position to be the worst, you know, at the beginning of the story where it’s obvious that the woman is still in love with her ex-husband.

And so it takes you back in time to, we would show you how they came to in, into this position. In the present storyline. But the funny thing about this structure was when I started the story, I didn’t know how much of the backstory I would have, and it turned out to be quite a lot. And so I couldn’t do it through flashbacks in a certain scene, just like her having her think back or something like that.

It had to be a dual timeline. But on, on the other hand, what really stood out as a problem is that there wasn’t enough story to pull it all the way through the end of the book. So [00:08:00] basically, I do have a dual timeline story up until the midpoint, where in that point it becomes a single timeline story and just happens going forward.

So this was structurally really clunky. It, it felt like, oh, how do I not jar the reader when they come to the midpoint and suddenly, you know, they’re not dipping into the past anymore. And the thing that I did was I looked to books that I read previously and really looked into the structure of those books and the paper Palace in particular.

Was structured this similar way and when you write the book in, in such a way, I don’t think most of my readers now even realize that the dual timeline doesn’t go all the way through. No, I was, I was thinking about it ’cause I wasn’t

Suzy V.: reading it for structure. I actually listened to the audio book, which I noticed a lot last when I listened to the audio book and so.

Yeah, and love that story. Thank you for sharing it, because [00:09:00] then I’ll just break it down for the listeners for a second, because there’s a couple of things that are really important when you’re considering writing a book like this. The first one is that, yeah, your initial thought is that it needs to be equal.

The timelines need to be equal, and then you’re like, Ooh, how do I, how do I get away with that? Right? How do I do that? And you did it seamlessly. ’cause I was like, Ooh, I, I didn’t even, I mean, I guess, but really I wasn’t watching for it. So people get stuck on that. That, so be open to it. It doesn’t need to be, and I see this when people have like three point of view characters, for example, they wanna go 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

No. Like, sometimes you’ve gotta push and pull and go 2, 2, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3, right? Like, you don’t know. So there’s that piece of it. So yeah, it, it definitely serves the story, but the F piece is how much backstory, you know, if you had set out, I love that you said, I didn’t know how much backstory I was going to use or how many of these dual timeline scenes, and [00:10:00] starting with the intent of having the minimum is actually.

Good plan because we only care about the backstory. It fitting forms or pushes us of what’s happening in today, right? In the story present timeline. I’m gonna get super technical for a second, but I know that Lidija’s got the same training as me, so she’s gonna be, she’s not in long. So if we’re in story present, we only care about the backstory.

We don’t wanna hear about, you know, a childhood story that has nothing to do with, or doesn’t inform us. Or help us predict how she’s gonna act. You did a terrific job. Everything in that past is really necessary. You also do a great job, and I’ll be careful not to do spoilers, but you said it even in the description of the book, there’s a reason that the divorce happened that only she and her mother-in-law know.

So we don’t find that out as alluded to, but we don’t find that out unless we track that backstory. So we’re like, what the hell happened? Right. So you kind of planted that so that we are interested in those past [00:11:00] scenes. So if anybody’s considering a dual timeline, don’t do it just for the trickiness of it.

You’ve gotta make sure that it serves the story and that the reader actually cares about what’s happening in that past. That it’s not just a different story. It’s really hard to create tension, which you did. It’s really hard to create tension in the past because we know how it turns out, right? Yeah. So we know that nobody’s dead.

I mean, I don’t, I don’t know. I won’t spoil anything, but nobody’s, you know, in, at least in the opening, nobody’s dead. We know that, so that we can’t put them in mortal danger. Uh, we know that they get divorced, so we know how it ends up. But the question is how, and that’s almost like a suspense books are, are structured in that way as well, or thrillers sometimes where we know that and we know who did it.

It’s not a mystery ’cause we don’t have to figure those things out. And yet we don’t know how that all came about. And so that’s what you’ve done is we know the outcome. We need to know how it came about. So everything that you’ve included in the past wishes us and we [00:12:00] care about it. ’cause we’re trying to figure out what the hell, how did they end up in this situation?

Yes, you got. Yes, exactly. No. Yeah. I wish you could see Lidija smiled. I did do that. Good. Someone gets that. I get it. I get it. I see you. I see you. Okay, so let’s talk about showing details because they’re beautiful. And you said six years ago you didn’t know about the concept of show hotel. How does showing inform, like what does that mean to you?

And I mean it’s a longer conversation, but baby pin thing and what does it mean to you and how did that inform how you wrote? Because you have so many details in there. How did you decide what’s important and what is it to show?

Lidija H.: Ooh, that’s such a great question because when I was learning about showed on TA rule, it’s.

Incredibly hard. It has so many facets. So many facets. Like from emotions to, yeah. Yeah. It’s like the most multifaceted rule out there for [00:13:00] writing.

Suzy V.: And yet people think it’s so simple. People think it’s simple. It’s like they, they, they learn showing emotions first, and that’s all they know. But that’s why we have a whole podcast about it.

And I’m writing a book on it because it’s like so, so complicated and so exciting to me.

Lidija H.: Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it because, and I hated it when I was starting out because it was so difficult because I would be told as a writer, you know, you’re telling, and I couldn’t, I didn’t know how to show, I didn’t know what it meant and, and, and how to execute that.

And also it’s like when I’m coaching writers, and I think this is important to say. It takes such a long time to read out. I work with someone and I’m showing them where they’re telling and I’m showing them how to show, and it still takes six months of ongoing coaching to read it out. It’s, it’s so incredibly far.

And then like the frustrating part for me was I would go to my book club where we [00:14:00] read re fiction and I would see a ton of telling. And I would be like, why did they get away with it, with, you know, why does it, and, and even more frustratingly, why does it, I don’t feel like it’s telling, I don’t feel like it’s off their intrusion.

I don’t feel like someone is like, spoonfeeding me the details. And a large part of that is in the, is is like you said in the, in the details that you put into the scene. So for instance, when. When you’re writing a book that spans 20 years, I will have a scene where it happens over a series of months, and so you can’t really, it’s not a scene that happens.

In a stretch of time that you can, that’s five minutes. Zoom in and hear everything, and hear all the, yeah, hear all the dialogue and be right there in the moment. You can’t Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because you have to, you know, especially in the past storyline, I sometimes had to like spend several months or maybe a year within one C [00:15:00] and these types of scenes, we talked about scenes before, we talked about postcards, and this is a summary and so in summaries and executing summaries.

You really do need to have a through line of that scene. Like there needs to be something that’s happening that you’re, you know, working through, you’re taking this problem that the characters have in this period of time, and then you’re like working through that. And everything that you tie back to that needs to tie.

Everything that you write needs to tie back to that problem. And then in advocating, like you need to be dipping the characters into small. Normal snippets of scene, like you’re using a summary, but then you dip in a certain moment where they talk, they’re talking to each other, and there’s a pot of tea boiling on the stove and you know, someone scrapes the chair on the table or whatever.

Infusing the work with sensory, putting the reader as often as you can [00:16:00] in these like moments where they’re grounded really helps done that so beautifully. Thank you so much. Yeah, it really does, does wonders in, in making, making it feel like it’s not failing when it actually is. No,

Suzy V.: it is. And and you talk about, you know, when you coach a writer and it takes about six months for it to sink in and for them to really get it.

And then eventually you get those pages from that writer and you say, okay, this is too much showing. Pull it back and do a summary. Right. You gotta skip ahead ’cause we don’t wanna hear this boring conversation. And they say, what? And I’m like, you’ve graduated, right? Like I’m like, show, show, show, show, show.

Okay, now you understand the concept and now you can play. And now you get to choose. When do you dip in? When do you dip out? I like to say it’s like, um, you’ve probably heard this before too. ’cause I think it probably is from Jenny actually. Initially, Jenny Nash, our mentor. And the CEO [00:17:00] of Author Accelerator, and it’s like having a camera and you’re showing is the zoom lens where you zoom in and you can hear everything and then the telling is like this zooming out.

And it’s like the montage in a movie, right? Like you’re kind of passing time, like you said, it spans months or years. Then what? But then don’t forget to also add those specific details, which those sensory details, which make us in the moment, they might be sensory or they might be specific thought, right, or dialogue or, or snippets, like little snippets that are detailed enough that we can hang onto them into that moment.

It, it helps that passage, right?

Lidija H.: Yeah, exactly. And it really takes the reader, it, it really takes the reader’s attention off of storytelling. So it kind of hides your writerly fingerprints. It’s just like they’re thinking about this detail, they’re thinking about your turn of phrase, they’re thinking about something that you’ve done here.

[00:18:00] You know, this like inconspicuous thing that happened and instead. Seeing you. Basically telling, so, yeah. Yeah. It’s about playing. It’s very exciting to me. I I love that we are talking about it. I know, I’m thinking

Suzy V.: that the podcast is all about, and so it’s probably not like all the other podcasts going on.

I know you’re in demand, um, where they’re like, what did you first think of this book? And I mean, that’s important too, but we talk about the craft of it, and I want people to go and read your book. Because it’s beautiful, because it’s smart, it does all of these things, and you can see how deliberately you’ve studied it and figured it out and pieced it together, and it’s such a beautiful example.

Don’t worry. We’re gonna have all the, the buy links and everything in the notes so that people can go and and check it out for themselves. Okay? Here’s the part of the episode where I’m gonna do some quick fire questions, so I know we could geek out all day, but these are shorter answers. Are you ready?

Okay, I’ll join. Don’t worry. [00:19:00] They’re not hard. I, I, I, what a episode. If you haven’t listened to the, if you’ve listened to the podcast before then, then you probably know when I’m gonna ask. Okay. This is your debut published novel, but it’s not your first novel that you’ve completed. How many books have you completed?

One before This one? Yeah. Okay. One before this one. And it’s still unpublished. Do you plan to, or do you have folks to

Lidija H.: have this book released in Croatian? I do, it’s been on submission in Croatia for, you know, since last September. It still hasn’t sold. So this goes to my previous, you know, explanation of being, it being harder to make it in Croatia than in the us.

Suzy V.: Yeah. Well, at some point. And so for those of you who knew to publishing, that would be the foreign language rights she would sell in Croatian. And so, but it is, it is being published in both North, north America and the uk. And you have separate, ’cause you have separate covers and separate separate deals [00:20:00] for that.

Right. Any, any other, any other sites on the horizon knowing I’m not That’s, that’s fine. I’m not supposed to talk

Lidija H.: about anything until,

Suzy V.: bless your son. We track it and we, we are going to view you.

Lidija H.: Okay. Thank you so much. How long did it take you to write this book? Okay, I’m going to try to keep it very short, as short as I can.

I wrote the first 150 pages in 2021, and then I, in earnestly, I earnestly, started working on it in September, 2022. Finished the first draft in 2020, in July, 2023. Started querying in November, 2023 and found, got three offers of representation straight outta the gate, nine full requests out of 20 query, and then sold the book two months later in an auction.

Suzy V.: Yeah, right. [00:21:00] That’s very fast. For those of you listening and being like, oh my gosh, that’s my target. This is very fast. Lidija literally quit her job as an attorney. Studied this for years and coached other writers have figured this out. When books are ready though, Leah, this is what, like I don’t find it’s a one in a thousand Chads.

Like that’s not, it’s not about odds When your book is as good as this book and when you’ve done the things that you’ve done, this is the kind of response that you’ll get when the book is ready, right when the book is ready. Okay. How long did it take you to write that first book that never got published?

Lidija H.: It’s hard to say because it never. You know, I, IWI wrote it and then I wrote many drafts and then queried it and then drafted again trying to get it to work for How long did you spend on that? I spent maybe three, four years. Yeah.

Suzy V.: Three or four years. And, and do you [00:22:00] think that now that you’re gonna be the big time, do you think you’ll be able to resurrect that book or are you done with it?

Uh, I’m personally

Lidija H.: done with it. Like even you’re personally done with it. I also wanted it to, to see it. I’m not going to show it to anyone. Fair enough. Hey, this is, it was my training book. It was my training book.

Suzy V.: Yeah. And this is what happens, right? Is you know, we feel called to write a book in the moment, but we change as well.

Yeah. Like not only do our skill sets change, but we change, and sometimes that book that we felt called to write six or seven years ago, the themes in it. What you want to spend your time with anymore, right? Like that’s okay. That’s totally fine. Okay. What was your first big break? When was the moment where you were like, this is real, this is happening.

This book is going to gonna be the one.

Lidija H.: The moment when I finished the first draft in July, 2023 and I purchased some online tickets to talk to agents [00:23:00] and I purchased five tickets. Spoke to five agents and four of them asked for a full, and it was okay, I’ve got something. It’s not, yeah. Super horrible, at least.

Suzy V.: Was that at a conference?

Lidija H.: I don’t know what you mean by purchasing. It was an online, it was an online conference. Online course. It was a news and the marketplace and it’s, I think now it’s in person, but in, in 2023, they were still doing it online. So I bought five tickets to, to speak to agents and they would, they read the first 10 pages, the synopsis and the query letter.

That’s what I was gonna ask,

Suzy V.: because sometimes they’re just verbal and you know, my first time I went to a conference, I shared the story before, but I did the same thing and I pitched four and I got four requests or like partial requests because they hadn’t, but I realized later. It wasn’t necessarily Recomme [00:24:00] because I knew how to pitch.

I’d worked on Wall Street and raised money, but they hadn’t read anything. They hadn’t read any pages for me. And it turned out at that point in time, that was very early, and it did become the fountain. That was my debut novel, but I, it wasn’t ready that, and I had been pitching it early, but I’d taken it as far as I could take it.

And then out of that, I eventually found a publisher sort of adjacent to that process. But yeah, but if they read pages and they’re asking for a full, that is impressive. Yeah. That’s the moment. Right. And was it, did you hesitate in buying those tickets to that conference? Like, or you knew this was what you were meant to do?

Or were you like, Ooh,

Lidija H.: I don’t know. It was so expensive. It needed to be really, you know, I needed to find a budget for that. And I was like, but I want to know, I was finishing the first draft. I just wanted, I was bewildered. I didn’t know if I, you know, I would ate between, [00:25:00] I’m a good writer or I suck and it like changed hourly.

Mm-hmm. And find any confidence in my writing at that time. And so I said, I’ll go there, I’ll see what they’re saying. The worst thing that happens, I’ll get some feedback they’re going to sell. Tell me that the book isn’t marketable. They’re going to tell me that my writing sucks and then I keep going.

The best thing that could happen was, you know, I’ll get one or two full recruiters. I didn’t expect to get more, more out of that. So, yeah, so I, I just thought it was a good moment to really test the premise and the writing. Like, do I cut it? Am I cutting it or not? Yeah. Did you end up, you didn’t

Suzy V.: end up signing with one of those agents, right?

Because then you went on to query.

Lidija H.: Yeah, I went on to query and I did query two out of those four agents. One of them offered representation, but by the time that I, [00:26:00] when I finished my four draft, when I was ready to go out querying, I had done like much more res research into like who I wanted my agent to be, like what type of agent I wanted for this book, and I really like bolstered by that response from those.

Four agents. You know, I, I really aimed high. Um, and so, and so some of the agents that I talked with, uh, didn’t have the track record that I thought my book.

Suzy V.: Wow. And, and look, that happened and it went to auction and, and you know, they may not have happened depending on who it is. And I, I like to say that, you know, query can be such a.

A very difficult process for many, many writers. And even if you’re getting a great response, it doesn’t mean that you should sign with the very first, especially if you’re getting a great response, you sign with the very first agent. It isn’t always a good thing. Many people wanna give a newer agent a chance, and [00:27:00] that can be a great partnership, but if they don’t have that track record, it’s very difficult for them to get them to be in the position that you’re in right now.

Lidija H.: Yeah. I, I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s, I, I, I just want to say that it’s a really difficult process. Like it did turn out to be very simple for my, you know, second book, but for my first book, I got over 130 rejections. Yeah. And two things I learned from that process is that I wasn’t always targeting the right agents because I wasn’t clear on what the genre of the book is.

I was. Querying uns selectively for literary fiction, not market fiction and moments fiction, not not being really sure what my book was. So there was a lot of what went, you know, queries that went in a wrong direction because those literary agents weren’t really a good fit for the book that I was pitching.

Agents that represent literary fiction because the book wasn’t literary fiction. And first, yeah. Yeah. In the first book. [00:28:00] And the other part of the problem was that I was fearing, I was like, I was in this mindset of an agent, like, gimme any agent. I just want, that’s what I’m saying, don’t just sign with the first agent.

Right. It’s not a good op. Like it depends on where you want to be. Like some, some writers would be like super satisfied with the smaller press, with uh, you know, smaller book deal, maybe hybrid publishing. You know what, whatever the thing is. It’s, it’s important to know what you want wasn’t your goal. Goal.

Yeah. What’s your goal? And my goal was big five. So I, I knew, you know, later on, like now when I’m looking at list of those agents that I queried the first time, a lot of those agents didn’t really have the track record to be able to sell that book anyway. So I act out in my rejections, I guess it Right.

Suzy V.: Things happen for a reason. Okay, last quick fire question. Looking at the cover of your book as an editor, I wanna know [00:29:00] was there any discussion, so the book is Slanting Towards the Sea. Was there any discussion that there should be an ask on Towards, and I asked that. There should be an S on the words slanting, pathy, or slanting towards the sea.

And I asked that and I’ll let you answer and then I’ll see why I asked it. Go ahead.

Lidija H.: Okay, so there was a discussion with my copy editor and here is the question of, you know, towards, is British Canadian? Yeah, it should be. It should be toward. And I’m like, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t come out right. And I emailed my editor and I said, you know, you know it’s your language, like huge Google, right?

And she said, it doesn’t feel right to be toward, but then we decided that throughout the book, the only person saying Towards is going to be lawful, which is the ex-husband.

Suzy V.: Oh, interesting. You don’t, you didn’t. Not nobody, but [00:30:00] I might have, but they might have noticed, I would’ve noticed if I read the print, but I did the audio book so I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t hear it.

Yeah, because I also, I mean I listened to a lot audio books. I listened to it and so gosh, like ’cause, because I like that. Uh, yeah. Okay. Well I’m glad I asked it then and probably nobody else notices that except for us editing Geeks Fun. Basically because I went to school, like I went to grade school in the US and then I moved back to Canada.

And so I am a grammar geek when it comes to differences in usage. But I do find many of my American writing clients, most of my writers, I work American, they will use it interchangeably, backwards towards all those things there. The but the more commonly accepted usage in the US is with LBS in Britain and in Canada.

S is normal. So anyways, sorry to geek out about that one detail. I am so happy that you have an Easter egg in there. I ordered the print copy as well and one day [00:31:00] when I come to Croatia, I will have you sign it. Or if you come to North America, even if it’s in the States, I will just come and have you sign it wherever you are.

’cause it’s easy. So yeah, I would love, love, love to meet in person one day. You have been such a huge influence on my career and such a huge help when we were both setting up Shaw. How can we find your books and talk a little bit about your book coaching service? Because the clients who get to work with you, especially in the genres that you excel in literary fiction, women’s fiction, like amazing, they are so, so lucky.

Where can

Lidija H.: we find you? So my book is, you know, everywhere where the books are sold. So, you know, in Canada and in the US. It’s in all the stores. You can find it basically everywhere. And it’s also out in the UK so you can, you can get it there. And in terms of book coaching, I’m taking a small pause because Coke launching and we [00:32:00] didn’t even talk about that.

You’ll have to come back on and talk about launching a book. Scott, launching a book is a full-time job. It takes a lot and I really, I really do. I’m really very de a very dedicated coach. I really. Um, you know, I, I do want to give like 100% to my clients and this wasn’t a period where, where I could do it.

So I’m, I’m taking a short break, but I’ll be back in in the fall and you can con contact me. We are my website. There’s, we’ll put all, we’ll put all the

Suzy V.: links there. Yeah.

Lidija H.: And fall

Suzy V.: 2025. So depending on when, if you’re listening to this later, the lady might just be your ideal book cook. So go and check her out.

Okay. Thank you so much. I’m gonna give you back your time. Thank you so much for coming

Lidija H.: on today, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast to be here. I love this.

Suzy V.: Thanks for tuning in to show hotel writing with [00:33:00] me, Susie Badori, I’ll me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.

If you’re feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you’re writing that isn’t quite where you want it to be, yet for our shuttle tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make it the absolute best you’re feeling called to write that book.

Keep going and I’m gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.