Posts by Kasey LeBlanc
It’s finally happened. After days, weeks, months, or even years of waiting you finally see the email you’ve been dreaming of — an agent you’ve queried wants to offer you representation!
After rereading the email about a dozen times (to be sure you aren’t dreaming), and perhaps calling or texting your most trusted writing friends to share the news, you might be struck with a single question.
What do I do now?
A close writing friend recently found herself in this position, and while chatting with her about the amazing news, I realized that we often spend so much time trying to perfect our query letters, our opening pages, our entire manuscripts, ourselves, anything we can do to attract the attention of an agent, that we don’t spend nearly enough time figuring out what steps you should be taking in the immediate aftermath of that initial offer. It can be tempting to write back and immediately say yes without even setting up a meeting — perhaps you’re afraid to jeopardize the offer, or maybe you want nothing more after all the stress and waiting in the query trenches to just skip to the part where you are officially an agented writer, but that would be a huge mistake. Publishing is a slow journey, and it can be tempting to just say “yes” when someone has finally said yes to you, but you owe it to yourself and to your novel to treat the days and weeks after that initial offer just as seriously as any other step in the process.
But where to start? Well, fortunately for you, when this situation happened to my friend, I wrote her a (very long) email guide and now I’m going to share an adapted version with you all, starting with a timeline, questions to consider asking agents, red flags to watch out for, and finally some general advice to remember!
Timeline:
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I know so many talented writers. Writers whose words are so beautiful they will make your heart ache, whose stories are so hilarious they bring tears to your eyes from laughing. Some of these writers are published or will be soon, many are not, for a variety of reasons. Like me, the vast majority of my writing friends wish to have their books traditionally published, which means not just writing a book, but finding an agent who then, if everything goes well, sells the book on submission to a publisher.
I have a confession to make. I’m slightly terrified for some of these friends to one day get a book deal.
It’s not, as you might anticipate, out of any kind of fear that their deal will be bigger than mine or that they will become some kind of bestseller and leave me in the dust. I hope both of those things happen (except for the leaving-me-in-the-dust part)! It isn’t because I don’t think their books deserve to be published, because they do, and I sincerely hope they are because it feels so incredibly unfair sometimes to have had the privilege of reading their work when so many others aren’t able to do that.
My fear instead comes from worrying what will happen when they realize that getting an agent or even a book deal isn’t going to be enough to permanently quiet the part of themselves that doesn’t recognize their own talent or that feels like a fraud. Because here is a hard truth: Getting a book deal is amazing, yes, but also opens up a whole new world of ways for you to feel inferior about your writing.
Traditional publishing is slow. Incredibly slow. You’ll go months hearing nothing from your agent or your editor. If you join a debut Slack or Discord group, or as you get to meet other authors in your debut year, you’ll learn that someone got a bigger advance than you or a two- or three-book deal to your one. Someone else will be nominated for an award that you won’t be, or will win an award that you didn’t. Someone else’s cover will come out faster, or they’ll have a bigger, splashier cover reveal. Someone will receive more marketing support than you, will receive blurbs from bigger name authors, or an author that said they were too busy to blurb your book. Someone will sell foreign rights to a dozen countries or have a big name director or producer interested in optioning their story, while all you’re hearing is silence.
And all the things I just mentioned? These are things that can happen even before the official start of your debut year!
Look, we all feel self-doubt sometimes–and if you’ve never once felt even a bit of self-doubt, I actually think that is a big problem in a different way. I’m not talking about that.
I think most of us will identify with some of the items on this list, but if you find yourself identifying with (nearly) all of them, and constantly, then this post is probably talking to you in particular:
1a) After you have your work […]
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This past weekend, I went home to visit my parents for Mother’s Day. Other than the rocks and shells and sea glass my mother collects, and which I bring her from whichever locale, near or far, I happen to visit over the course of a year, she is determined to get rid of pretty much everything else in the house. Which is how I found myself in the garage, going through boxes of things, looking to see what could be tossed or sold.
In doing so, I came across a box of old notebooks and a folder, inside of which was the four-page handwritten story I wrote in fourth or fifth grade, the first complete story I ever wrote. I have vague recollections of writing it for a school assignment, hand flying frantically across the pages the night before it was due (a theme that unfortunately continues to this day, though I’ve upgraded to a laptop), but what I don’t remember is where this story came from, or why I decided to write about a bus driver pulling a gun on his students on their first day of school.
The bus driver’s motivations are similarly vague, but when he says to the main character and her friends that they’ve “solved too many mysteries for [his] liking”, I recognize something about who I was when I wrote that story– a huge fan of Scooby-Doo and a voracious reader of all things mystery – Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, The Boxcar Children, Trixie Belden, the A to Z Mysteries… If you could name it, I had probably read it, and since I hadn’t managed to find myself as part of a real-life mystery solving youth gang, I did the next best thing. I gave life to one through my characters.
My characters (and their level of self-insertedness) evolved as I did over time. In my middle and high school writings, I can tell you exactly which boy I had a crush on as I wrote the first few pages of new story after new story. If I couldn’t get them to like me in real life, I could contrive some fantastical story to throw my characters together–sudden telepathy shared only by them, or being snowed in overnight at school.
By the time I was in college, I had mostly moved past that. Instead of two dozen barely started stories, I had one mostly complete, and then finally complete novel. My characters were no longer Kasey 2.0, but their own fully fleshed out characters. I felt good about where I was in my writing and was convinced that this book would be the one that would net me an agent and eventually a book deal.
And then, in the summer of 2017 I realized I was trans. And after putting my writing on hold for a time as I dealt with that, I had the initial idea for the book that will soon be out in the world as my debut novel, and immediately knew that this story was the one I was meant to tell. The novel’s main character, Asher, is a trans guy like me, though past that, many of the similarities end. Unlike me, he realized he was trans at a young age. […]
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This past Friday at sundown began the Jewish month of Elul, the last month of the year and a month for teshuvah, a word often translated as repentance, but which more literally means return. I’ve spent the past couple of years working towards my conversion and learning about the cycle of the Jewish year. And as I write this post, it has me thinking about other cycles in our lives, about the natural ebbs and flows of people and nature, and so, in the spirit of Elul, this is not my usual advice post. Instead, this post is an apology, a forgiveness, and a reminder.
But first, I have a confession to make.
I’ve barely written since last November. It isn’t that the creative well has run dry. I have a new novel idea I’m eager to dive into, edits due on my current book and plenty of ways to improve it, and a short story idea I’ve been mulling over for more than a year now.
Furthermore, I know I feel better emotionally when I’m writing on a consistent basis. I feel more accomplished, more creative. I generate more ideas and the writing improves in turn. Sometimes I write so consistently and so much that I even impress myself. Back in October 2018, when my current novel was little more than an idea and 5,000 words of a draft, I decided I wanted to apply to GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program. The application was due mid-February of 2019, and I would need to submit an entire manuscript draft to even apply. So I logged onto the NaNoWriMo website, opened Scrivener and began working.
I wrote every day for a month and a half and by mid-December had an 85,000 word draft. I wrote 80,000 words in six weeks y’all. That’s nearly 2,000 words each and every day.
I’m not sure I’ve written more than 2,000 words in the past six months.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been in the “ebbing” portion of this ebb and flow cycle of writing. I thrive on novelty and work best (and often only) under the pressure of a deadline (some of you may be unsurprised to learn that I am currently looking into being tested for ADHD), and can go months at a time without touching a story. It’s not… ideal to say the least. It can be frustrating to feel like you aren’t reaching your potential, to feel like you’ve got a story trapped inside and can’t get it out. Even more frustrating when you have proof of just how high you can soar.
Under the right conditions.
Conditions that are vague and elusive, that seem to work sometimes and not others.
Conditions that feel like trying to map out an ever-shifting maze when everyone else sees a straight corridor.
It doesn’t help when so much writing advice from published authors is about consistency. Writing every day. Butt in the chair, hands on the keyboard. It sounds so simple, so easy. So when I fail to do it, over, and over, and over again, the sense of shame […]
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The last time I wrote a post for Writer Unboxed was back in December. I was in the querying trenches having, well, not a grand time, but learning to appreciate the journey and everything I’d accomplished these past few years.
Then 2022 rolled around and my journey sped up. Like, really really sped up. In a span of two months, I received my first agent offer, which became five offers, which became choosing my agent, doing a very quick revision pass, going on sub to editors, and selling my book at auction two weeks later.
Unfortunately there’s no magic advice that I can give to those of you in or ready to jump in either the query or submission trenches. Trust me, I have too many talented friends who have been struggling in both much longer than I. But what I can do is talk about the tools I used to structure my journey through querying – in particular, the websites that helped me figure out who to query and when, because that is one part of the process you can actually control. And I think we could all use a little more of that these days.
Some considerations before jumping into querying
Choosing which agents to query and when can be daunting. It can seem that there are so many options you might never narrow it down, but also that there aren’t nearly enough. Once the rejections start coming in (or, worse, not coming in – ghosting is very, very real), it can feel like your options are slipping away. Add to that wait times of two months or more in some cases, and policies against simultaneous submission to multiple agents within an agency, and it might seem impossible to ever decide who to send to. But it’s not, and I’m going to show you the tools I used to help narrow it down.
Manuscript Wishlist (MSWL) / Agency Websites (price: free)
Perhaps you’re already familiar with some agents or agencies, and you want to know what exactly they are looking for. Maybe you follow a handful on Twitter or you have some friends in the business and they’ve given you some leads. Almost all agency websites will have a section listing all of their agents and many will list exactly what they represent and what they are looking for. This can be very helpful when you can only query one agent at a time from the agency (or in some cases, only one agent altogether!).
Another great resource is the Manuscript Wishlist website. I can’t count the number of times I saw an agent on Twitter and googled their name + “MSWL” and up popped a page full of useful information. I’ve seen everything from descriptions of how they work with clients, to clients the agent represents, lists of their favorite books […]
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Like many of us in the pre-Covid days, I had grand literary plans for my novel-in-progress and a timeline I felt was realistic. Not too ambitious, not too plodding. Just right, like a Goldilocks’ timeline of book publishing.
This wasn’t the first time I was convinced that my time for querying agents was near. Before starting my current book in 2018, I’d worked on another for four years, and each year felt like the year I’d finally query, and each year it wasn’t.
By the early days of March 2020, I’d shelved my first book and was finishing up a year-long intensive novel revision program for my second alongside peers who have become some of my best friends and fiercest story advocates. My full novel draft had been revised and read through for the second time, I knew exactly what changes I wanted to make, and by the end of the summer I’d be ready to send my manuscript off to the inboxes of agents who were surely eagerly awaiting the brilliance contained within.
Then COVID hit. And suddenly I was cut off from all the structures, places, and people who had made the incredible feat of novel-writing possible. Gone were morning writing sessions in cafes with friends to keep me accountable, afternoon writing sessions in the library or dining hall of the college dorm I work for / live in. Late night drinks at the bar with my writing classmates, working through plot difficulties and celebrating each other’s accomplishments were a thing of the past. Suddenly my single room, once spacious because I counted an entire dorm as my living space, became my entire world. Bedroom, living room, office, dining room, and kitchen. And I lived for the Zoom meetings and text messages with friends that let me know they still existed and that one day I’d see them again in person.
So perhaps it is no surprise that my timeline fell straight out the window. I don’t know when I resumed writing, but it wouldn’t be far off to guess it wasn’t until late 2020 or early 2021. As if COVID didn’t have me feeling bad enough, I felt like a failure for my inability to write. The grace I was so ready and willing to grant to everyone else felt elusive when I attempted to turn it upon myself.
Things improved in 2021 – warming weather, vaccines, and finally seeing friends I’d missed dearly helped me return to my writing, and by April or May I’d finally finished the revision I’d thought would be done ten months prior. That accomplishment gave me a huge boost of energy, which I used to create a list of potential agents, work on a query letter and synopsis, and prepare to send queries out.
Meanwhile, I sent the draft to a few friends, and through their feedback, realized I wasn’t ready to query yet. My revision had done so much for the book, but if I wanted it to be the best it could be, I needed to do more. At first my momentum remained strong, but soon I was missing each new deadline I set […]
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On December 1st, 2020, actor Elliot Page came out publicly as transgender. And on December 4, 2020, I became a published writer.
There’s a story here, of course, connecting the two. It begins with an excited Facebook post on my end about the Elliot Page news–practically a national holiday for the transmasculine community!– followed by a text from my good friend and fellow writer, Sara Shukla, asking if I might be interested in pitching a short piece about Elliot’s coming out to her editor at WBUR–Boston’s NPR News Station.
I’ll be honest– my initial reaction was “no, thank you.” Though I’ve wanted to be a published writer since I was a kid, my dream is novels, not articles. And besides, I’m not a trained journalist or someone particularly important. I’d always assumed that if I published any sort of personal essay or the like, it would be to accompany my novel’s eventual publication, or perhaps afterwards, when I had some credit to my name. Who would want to hear anything I had to say now?
But like all great ideas, once it was planted, I couldn’t get it out of my head. My “no thanks” quickly became a “well, maybe” and then an “okay, so I drafted a short piece.” With some encouragement and coaching from Sara, I sent it off, figuring that at the worst WBUR would pass, and at best they’d take it and I’d get my fifteen minutes of attention from friends on Facebook and Twitter.
It was of course the best case scenario. Better even. Not only was the piece accepted, polished, and published within three days, but it wasn’t just my friends who saw it. Nor did its impact end with my fifteen minutes of (minor) fame. My article was seen by not one but two people who then reached out and asked me to write for their websites. Writer Unboxed was one of those opportunities. And I only received that opportunity because one writing friend encouraged me to take a leap I wasn’t sure I was qualified for, and another re-shared my work on Twitter and vouched for me as a writer.
I don’t tell you this story to brag, but because my experiences in the past few months have taught me a lot. I haven’t given up on my novel or that particular dream, far from it. If anything, freelance writing has shown me that the years pursuing writing have not been in vain. If you’re anything like me, years spent working on a novel, or multiple novels, or multiple drafts of multiple novels, can leave success and completion feeling elusive, at best. Freelance writing has been a way to hone my craft, make connections in the writing world, get my name in print, and even make a small amount of money. It’s an opportunity I didn’t realize was an option, and now I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned with you, including the whys, the hows, and a couple of warnings.
Potential perks of freelance writing for novelists-in-progress:
Complete the circuit. Writing a book is long and hard and sometimes feels like a dark slog through a cold forest in […]
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Please welcome new contributor Kasey LeBlanc to the Writer Unboxed team! From his bio:
Kasey LeBlanc (he/him) is a graduate of Harvard College and of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, where he was an Alice Hoffman Fellow. He has been published by WBUR’s Cognoscenti and was a finalist in 2018 for the Boston Public Library’s Writer-in-Residence Position. He is currently revising his Novel Incubator manuscript, a young adult novel about a closeted trans teenage boy, Catholic school, and a magical dream circus.
We’re so glad to have you with us, Kasey!
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If you’ve taken a writing class before, you’re probably familiar with the stereotypical “nightmare” student. He, for it’s often a he, is someone who thinks his words are a gift to humanity, someone who skewers other writers with his harsh criticisms, but is unwilling or unable to take feedback on his own writing. This person may be someone you’ve encountered in your own writing workshops, or perhaps is simply a fictional bogeyman meant to scare students into being better workshoppers. Either way, it seems that we focus a lot on this type of student.
I’ve taken a fair few workshops, most with the wonderful GrubStreet writing organization in Boston, and I’ve not seen many of this type of writer. But I have seen plenty of another type of writer. This writer is the opposite of the nightmare student in many ways. Instead of skewering their classmates’ work, they give advice generously and kindly. And rather than rejecting the suggestions given to them, they take them in. All of them. Or, when they don’t, they stress that they should somehow incorporate them all.
Today I would like to talk about this second type of writer and when you might choose to ignore a suggestion and stand up for your vision.
A book that pleases everybody is a book that pleases nobody. Or, as Aesop may have once said in a fable about a man, a boy, and a donkey (helpfully titled The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey), “If you try to please all, you please none.” It’s an unfortunate truth that in the end there can only be one version of the book we write. Along the way we’ll try out many different versions, but eventually need to pick just one. “Okay, sure Kasey,” you might be saying, “that’s a task much easier said than done.” As a writer known for drastically revamping and overhauling my book between drafts rather than getting to the nitty gritty line edit stage, I totally feel you. But if there is one thing I’ve become good at doing, it’s choosing when to listen to writing advice, and when to pass. And today I’m going to pass along three bits of advice I hope will help you.
1. Know your audience. Who are you writing this book for? My current manuscript is a YA novel about a closeted trans teenage boy and a magical dream circus. While I hope that my book can speak to many people, I write first for teens and for transgender people of all ages.
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