I had Katie Leibel on Rooftop Conversations, and I’ll be honest, I’ve been looking forward to sharing this conversation for a while. Katie is an aspiring author and a marketing communications professional here in Minnesota, and she’s been working on a novel called “The Misadventures of Mick and Mark” that I genuinely could not put down.
I’d already read four or five chapters before we sat down to record, and I told her candidly that her manuscript made me laugh, a lot.
Here’s the setup she shared. A man is living alone on a farm in rural Minnesota and he just got back from Afghanistan. His dad is dead and everyone he used to know has either moved away or moved on without him, and he is, in Katie’s words, “a little bit lost in life.” Then an alien crashes into his barn and his truck. Not some sleek, terrifying alien either. He’s not a Kryptonian, Martian or lanky green thing we’ve come accustomed to. This thing is cute, lovable and completely egotistical, and it demands to see Earth’s leaders.
“Which one?” Katie quoted her book, laughing. “We have like 200.”
The alien, Mick, is convinced humanity is on the verge of destroying itself and insists he’s there to save everyone. Mark, the human, wants none of it.
What happens next is this begrudging, banter-filled friendship between two beings from completely different worlds, and somewhere along the way, they both end up saving themselves, not just the planet.
Where this book actually came from
Katie told me she started writing this during the pandemic, originally as a kind of silly exercise: what if you had to explain the entire world, racism, society, pop culture, all of it, to someone with zero context.
“I felt a little bit like an alien looking around for the hidden cameras,” she said about her own life. That feeling is basically baked into Mick’s character.
She shelved it for a while because she worried it sounded too much like other alien buddy stories. Then last February, she lost her job, and instead of spiraling, she decided to treat it as a sign. She gave herself a goal of 10 pages a day and kept going from there.
“It’s really about the power of friendship and the power of one and saving yourself,” she told me. “We all have a little bit of that want to save the world in our soul, especially when we’re young.”
That line stuck with me. I think a lot of us had that feeling in college and lost some of it once real life, bills and capitalism showed up.
Why Blue Earth, specifically
Katie set the book in Blue Earth, Minnesota, partly because her sister lives there, and partly because she wanted to write honestly about what farming actually looks like right now. The farm in the book grows soybeans, which she pointed out were caught in the middle of a U.S. trade war with China around the time she was writing.
“That county is one of the poorest ones in Minnesota,” she said, walking me through how seed licensing, equipment rental and unpredictable harvest scheduling can quietly squeeze a farmer who’s already struggling.
I’ll admit, as the guy running a publication built around Superman, I couldn’t help but point out the obvious. An alien crash-landing on a farm in the Midwest? We know that story. Katie laughed and agreed, but said she wanted to do something different with it, something that stayed grounded in a real place instead of some distant fictional world.
That’s actually what I love most about this book. It’s not happening in some galaxy far away. It’s happening in my backyard, a few hours from my house. There’s a pride in that I didn’t expect to feel reading someone else’s manuscript.
The characters all have a piece of her in them
Katie told me every character in the book carries something of her own personality. Mick comes from her habit of asking people to explain things to her like she’s an alien who’s never heard of them before, which, if you know Katie, tracks completely.
Rosie, a mechanic who works at her father’s shop, is probably the closest to Katie herself. She told me about working alongside her own dad gutting a house down to the studs, about volunteering wherever she can, and about helping her father manage a Twin Cities food program he ran for years because he wasn’t comfortable with the technology side of it.
“I am my father’s eldest son,” she joked, but I don’t think she was entirely joking.
The hard part: actually getting it published
This is the part that I think a lot of writers, and honestly, a lot of creative people in general, will relate to. Katie has been querying literary agents for a while now. She’s gotten close. One agent told her he loved the concept, a chronic-illness storyline wrapped in a funny sci-fi premise, but ultimately passed because comedic sci-fi is a hard sell.
She also told me she tried using AI tools to help polish her query letters, and her review of that experiment was blunt.
“It does not do a good job,” she said. “It is shit.”
She’s specifically hoping to find a literary agent based here in Minnesota, since the book is so tied to this state. She hasn’t ruled out self-publishing either, though she said the logistics and taxes involved make that a daunting option.
What stuck with me most, though, was something she said almost in passing.
“No one is coming to save you,” she told me. “That’s a hard lesson I’ve had to learn.”
It made for a good comeback story, she added, and honestly, after spending an hour talking with her, I believe her. I truly think this book is going to find its way into the world.
The novel remains unpublished as of this episode’s release. The Daily Planet will continue to follow Leibel’s progress toward publication. In the meantime, Katie will be sharing her talents with the Planet as an infrequent contributing writer. You can contact Katie at katie.leibel1998@gmail.com
