2026 Kidlit Zombie Week Day 2: The Many Resyrrections of No Legs, No Limits by Kanya Sesser and Nisha Lamsam Ligon

Hi, everyone! Kaitlyn Sanchez here! I’m so excited to share this awesome blog guest blog post by my wonderful clients Kanya Sesser and Nisha Lamsam Ligon. This is about the journey their book took to publication, and I hope it inspires you in your revisions. Without further ado, here are Kanya and Nisha!

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The Many Manuscript Resurrections of No Legs, No Limits

by Kanya Sesser and Nisha Lamsam Ligon

What’s purple and yellow, has no legs, and has gone through more resurrections than a zombie on the Walking Dead? Our picture book, NO LEGS, NO LIMITS! 

We connected with each other in August 2022, bonded through our shared Thai heritage, and immediately decided to write a picture book together. It was a no-brainer: with Kanya’s amazing story (from being found on a roadside in Thailand to becoming a champion para-athlete, model and actor), plus Nisha’s experience writing for children (co-creator of multiple award-winning kids’ TV shows), we’d have a perfect picture book ready for publication in no time!

What we didn’t see coming were dozens of drafts, three completely different book concepts, and four years of hard work to finally get Kanya’s story out in a beautiful book (coming from Little Bee Books on Nov. 3)! Manuscripts perished in the submission trenches, but we revived them with fresh rewrites… only for them to get the chop again at acquisitions. But Kanya’s learned a thing or two about revival from acting in Fear the Walking Dead, Nisha’s had practice pivoting to save projects from the clutches of (un)death, and our agent, Kaitlyn Sanchez, exudes more optimism than a kid sprinting at a zombie horde with a plastic baseball bat.

So we regrouped, rethought, rewrote and resubmitted… until we ended up with a book that was so much better than anything we had initially imagined, and we are so proud to finally put out in the world.

We’re sharing this glimpse into the long journey to publication, to give writers a glimmer of hope that if you believe in your story enough (and can summon the hope and humility to resurrect it as something new) then you can find a way to bring it to the world.

First Life: Kanya Can

Our first manuscript was a rhyming picture book biography, telling the story of Kanya’s life. It covered all the twists and turns of Kanya’s amazing story, from being raised by the nurses in a hospital in Thailand, to her adoption and move to America, to learning to skateboard and becoming a championship para-athlete. But it was far too long, and the rhyming verse was more chaotic than a swarm of new zombies. 

They picked her up, let the blanket fall.

Oh! The baby had no legs at all!

But don’t you worry, it was okay,

She was simply born that way.

We revised, refined and rewrote. Third person. First person. Iambic hexameter. Dactylic tetrameter. Nisha would spend days clapping out different meter schemes to fit every syllable, and dreading the day she’d have to try to replicate them in Thai. (Did we mention we planned to have a bilingual version in English and Thai? Oh the ambition of new picture book writers!)

All the roads were so big, and the buildings so tall!

All the things that I saw made me feel very small.

It was different and new, I felt worried and scared, 

I was different and new, so the people all stared.

We even worked with an artist in Thailand to create a dummy for us to test with kids. And finally we reached a point where the manuscript flowed, and the kids who read it loved it. So we took our manuscript and our hopes out to the world…

…where they just about. But thankfully, our super-agent Kaitlyn Sanchez saw a spark of life in the manuscript and suggested we resuscitate it as prose. 

First revival: Guts, Grit and Love

In the second life of our book, we reworked it to focus on Kanya’s move from Thailand to the USA when she was a small child: the culture shock, the language barrier, and the guts, grit and love that saw her through it. 

(Illo: Kanya talks to her reflection in the washing machine door.)
And when I needed to talk to a friend, I found a place in my big new house where I could speak to the only person who understood my language: Me.

This new version stomped out into the world with lots of guts, but despite getting some interest, it also died in the trenches. Thankfully, we got lots of feedback from different editors. 

Some said that the market for picture book biographies was already saturated. Others weren’t fans of the repetitive motifs we’d included. And quite a few wanted us to focus more on Kanya’s struggles with her disability, to which Kanya’s response was, “Well, that’s just not my story.” 

But a few comments got some little nerves twitching. Especially the suggestion from one sharp editor that the story could be reworked to sit beside THE PROUDEST BLUE. That suggestion spurred us back into rethinking, until we couldn’t help but try to create a whole new creature! 

Final Resurrection: No Legs, No Limits

We dug back through the graves of our old stories to find what nuggets of truth were the most important to us, and we found a whole new way to tell the story: as a ‘day in the life’ picture book, following Kanya as a kid on the day she learns to skateboard. 

True to Kanya’s outlook and experiences, we focused not on struggles of having no legs, but rather on the struggle of what people assume about you when you have no legs. And how they often jump in to help without asking first. 

NO LEGS, NO LIMITS was born, and it was finally the book we needed to write. But we’d never have found our way there without the zombie manuscripts that came before it. 

Though the new manuscript didn’t get through acquisitions at the publisher that had suggested the revision, it found the perfect home at Little Bee Books. And it has now been brought to full and vibrant life with brilliant illustrations by Lenny Wen. We’re so excited that our book will finally be released this fall!

This book transformed from a rhyming biography, to an inspiring immigration tale, to an empowering day-in-the-life story that’s relatable to any kid who’s ever felt unheard. And yours can transform too, as many times as inspiration can strike you. So pull out those zombie manuscripts. Ask yourself what nugget of truth from them is most important to you. And don’t be afraid to go all in, Dr. Frankenstein style, to mash it up, shock some new energy into it, and bring it to life again in a whole new form! 

Happy writing!

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