My agent, Gaby Naher, is invaluable. For so many reasons. Let me list just a few.

She is the very first person who was willing to take a chance on the To Become a Whale manuscript. After sending through my manuscript pdf, and waiting a few weeks, at work one day I received an email. I still have it. Here it is in almost its entirety:Dear Ben, 

I’m reading this now and am captivated. Can you please confirm that you’re still looking for representation, and can you also please tell me a little bit more about yourself.

You can imagine my reaction. After years and years of banging my head against the publishing industry door, this was the first big thumbs up (I’m going to post the smaller thumbs up – which were equally as important – at a different time). I put the email away back in my pocket and just sat with it for a minute. Just enjoying the feeling. I felt like I had a secret superpower.

So Gaby needs a huge amount of credit for this point alone.

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After my very first phone call with Gaby, where she said she’d send through some paperwork so she could represent To Become a Whale, I opened this bottle of wine. I’d been saving it for years. It was a huge moment.
She named Snake Island. It’s about time I come clean about this. Gaby has a knack for titles. Snake Island wentthrough a lot of title changes. I’ll list them here, and you might see why Gaby’s title eventually won out… I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts!

Meaningless! Meaningless! I still like this title. Exclamation marks and all. It’s literary for sure. Taken from Ecclesiastes, which has a lot to do thematically with Snake Island. Plus Hemingway did that. A lot. Problem with this title was the reviews kind’ve wrote themselves…
The Sea is Never Full – Same deal as above. I actually managed to sneak this phrase into the first page of Snake Island, so keep an eye out for it. This title is from Ecclesiastes again, and to me, talks about the idea that no matter how many things we fill our lives with, we’ll never find meaning. Problem with this title is that it’s super pretentious.


Gaby helped shape Snake Island significantly. She did with To Become a Whale also. She has a great eye forparts of the manuscript that could be even better. Chapters written from the perspective of a character were removed from the manuscript and inserted more organically into the narrative in other ways. One very significant change was the change of one of the characters.This novel discusses the very real, very important topic of domestic violence, from a variety of viewpoints. However, as Gaby noted in an earlier draft, the reader never really experienced the effects of this violence, and only heard characters talk about it obliquely. To that end, one character was changed from a male, into a female.

This meant rewriting from the beginning. I think, looking back, that I’d always avoided writing from afemale perspective because I was nervous. I was nervous I would get it wrong on an innate level, of course (we’ve all read some truly horrible male writers attempting to write from a female perspective) but I was also nervous that I wouldn’t be able to handle the topic well. Domestic violence is such a traumatic, awful thing – I didn’t want to handle the topic without nuance or sensitivity, nor did I want to accidentally paint over its effect. Hence, my nervousness.

I hope, in the end, that I’ve done well. I was certainly pushed creatively, regardless. And that’s all thanks to Gaby.

This entire post reads like an advertisement for Gaby, and for agents and general, and it kind’ve is. My books wouldn’t be what they are without Gaby’s guidance, and they certainly wouldn’t be in people’s hands. She opened these doors for me, and I’m incredibly grateful.