Tag: author

Introducing Myself

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 4

Before I can write a character, I have to introduce myself to them. That sounds strange for people I invented, but it’s the truest way I know to describe it. I have to spend time — not just in the story I want to tell, but in the world they live in — until they stop being pieces I move around and become someone I actually know.

With Phase Defiant, the one I spent the most time with was Tiffany. She’s fourteen. I am not, and never have been, a fourteen-year-old girl. (My wife has, which helped more than she’ll ever get credit for.) So I had to sit with what it would actually feel like to be that age and suddenly have a power you never asked for, while you’re still learning to manage your own emotions. Terrifying. And then the harder part — getting her to find the courage to make the choices the story needed from her. You can’t rush a person to that. You have to know her first.

Early on I wanted my characters to be perfect. Strong, capable, sweeping in to overcome evil, no flaws anywhere. A perfect character, it turns out, can’t tell a story. There’s nothing to watch. You need to see someone face adversity, take the setback, come up short and keep going — and none of that is possible if they were invincible to begin with. So I look for the flaws as carefully as the strengths now, because the two together are what tell me how far I can push a person, and where they’ll break, and where they’ll hold.

And they surprise you. In Phase Defiant, Jennifer started as a minor character — someone in the background at the Overwatch facility, barely a name. But the more time I spent with her, the more I understood she couldn’t stay minor. She ended up a hinge the whole story turns on. I didn’t plan that. I just spent enough time with her to hear who she actually was.

People call that “the characters taking over,” like it’s magic. I don’t think it’s magic. I think it’s what happens when you’ve spent so long inside someone’s head that you can brainstorm from their point of view instead of your own. You’re not being visited. You’ve just finally learned them well enough to stop guessing.

But knowing them that well cuts both ways, and this is the part I didn’t see coming. When you truly know a character, there are stretches of the story where you love them — and the work still requires you to send them somewhere hard. Somewhere they’ll suffer, or fail, or turn into someone you don’t like for a while. If they were strangers, that would be easy. They’re not. I’ve come to care about these people, and then I have to be the one who puts them through the worst of it.

I do it because I can see who they might become. The hard road is the only one that gets them there.

Phase Defiant is available on Amazon.

The Route

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 3

I sat down to work on the novel tonight and didn’t write a single sentence of it. I spent the whole session working out how the major threads connect — how one specific character has to move through the story to get where she needs to end up. No pages. Nothing I could post. If you’d watched me, it would have looked like I was doing nothing but arguing with myself at a desk.

That’s exactly what I was doing. And it was the work.

For most of my life I wrote the other way around. I started with words — got something down, anything, and then went looking for the order afterward. Find the shape in the pile once the pile exists. That’s the advice you hear everywhere, and it’s not wrong. It just isn’t right for this book.

This story has an endpoint. I know where it lands. It’s not the kind of thing that gets to wander off wherever it wants — every thread has to arrive at a specific place, and my job is to navigate the characters there without losing the intent I started with. When you already know the destination, the writing isn’t discovery. It’s routing. And you can’t route until you’ve solved the map.

So the map was tonight’s work. Getting it wrong doesn’t show up as a bad sentence I can fix later — it shows up as a whole climax that can’t exist because I built toward it on a thread that doesn’t hold. Cheaper to find that at the desk, arguing, than four chapters deep.

Here’s the part I have to stay honest about, though, because “I’m working out the structure” is one of the great writer’s alibis. It’s the most respectable-sounding way there is to not write for a year. I’ve done my own version of it.

The tell, for me, isn’t whether pages came out. It’s whether I fought. Real structural work is arguing with myself for hours — turning a problem over, rejecting the easy answer, sitting in the part that won’t resolve. Avoiding looks different. Avoiding is writing down one idea, deciding it’s good, and closing the laptop satisfied. One of those leaves me tired and further along. The other leaves me comfortable and exactly where I started.

Tonight I was tired. The story is the same on the page as it was this morning — not a word of it written — but I know how it moves now in a way I didn’t twelve hours ago.

Twenty-Two

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve sold twenty-two copies of my first novel.

I’m going to sit with that number for a second, because it means two things at once.

First — I wrote a book. A real book. A story I’m genuinely proud of. It has four five-star reviews on Amazon from people who aren’t just being nice. One of them is a stranger who picked it up because a friend recommended it. He put everything else down to finish it. He’s waiting for book two.

Twenty-two people have read something I created, and the ones who’ve talked to me about it say it’s good. Not polite good. Real good.

That feels like something.

Second — twenty-two is not enough. Not because I need validation, but because I know this book could reach people if they could find it. And right now, they can’t. Because I have no idea how to make that happen.

I spent tonight doing research. Honest, unglamorous research into what it actually takes to get a self-published novel in front of readers on Amazon. And here’s what I learned: I don’t know anything about this part of the process.

I know how to write a book. I don’t know how to sell one. Getting the algorithm to show it to people, building the kind of social proof that makes a stranger willing to take a chance on an author they’ve never heard of — I’m standing at the edge of what I know. And there’s nothing out here but questions I haven’t answered yet.

That’s an uncomfortable place to be. Especially after eighty-five days of building systems and shipping work and feeling like the momentum is real. Because the momentum is real. I know where I’m going. I just don’t have the skill yet to get the book there with me. And the only way to learn it is the same way I’ve learned everything else this year. Read. Ask questions. Build a system. Execute. Adjust.

I didn’t know how to write a novel until I wrote one. I didn’t know how to build a daily habit system until I built one. I don’t know how to market a book yet. But I will.

Twenty-two copies. Four five-star reviews. One stranger who couldn’t put it down.

That’s not a failure. That’s a foundation.

P.S. If you want to check it out: https://a.co/d/06d0FLNf

Day 49: Standing on My Own Shoulders

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 49 — The 7-40 Challenge

February 23, 2026

I spent some time today going through old papers. Old goals. Old to-do lists. Old projects. I hoard projects the way some people hoard shoes, apparently.

I was reviewing them to see where my mind has been — not just recently, but for several years. And what I found surprised me. Many of the goals I’m working on today are goals I’ve been working on for quite some time, whether I called them by the same name or not.

A pattern is emerging: I was more productive than I was giving myself credit for. And some of the successes I’m having today are standing on the shoulders of things I did years ago — things I may not have been completely ready for at the time.

What do I mean by that?

I’ve been listening to Linchpin by Seth Godin. If I had to break the book down into one tagline, it would be this: listen to your inner genius and defeat the resistance. When I was younger, I understood what that meant. But I didn’t understand it the way I do today. Maybe that’s a product of age, time, and perspective. Probably all three.

Here’s what I realize now: my resistance — my hesitation, my inability to push projects forward — had much more to do with not knowing what I was doing than it did with motivation. I was plenty motivated. I was working hard.

I wrote a children’s book years ago. I had an idea, wanted to get it out, wanted to push it onto Amazon so people could share the story with me and, honestly, so I could make some money. I think I sold ten copies. That might be generous. I was probably in the hole after all the printing and formatting and noise it took to get it right.

But here’s the thing — it wasn’t that I couldn’t get a product put together. I could. I did. The book existed. The problem was that I didn’t understand fundamentally how to do the next step. I didn’t even have the framework to ask the right questions.

Fast forward to now. I just published a teen superhero novel set in the 1990s called Phase Defiant. I got it onto Amazon KDP just a couple of days ago. I’m working through a few final revision items Amazon wants before the print version goes live.

And I’m at this place again — the place where the creative work is done and the real work begins.

But this time is different. Instead of wishing and hoping things will go well, I have a plan. I’ve laid out a research-based approach to getting eyes on my book. I’m using the tools at my disposal. I’m studying ARC teams, BookTok strategies, content marketing, audience building. I’m turning research into actionable items.

This is the part I didn’t understand when I was younger: just getting your idea done does not mean you are successful. It means you can finish a project. But finishing the project doesn’t mean everybody’s naturally going to love it, because once you finish it, the real work apparently begins — getting people to notice it, recognize it, and love it just as much as you do.

I want to embrace this next part of the journey. I’m truly proud of this book. I believe the themes in it and the story it tells are worthy of people’s time. I hope that when teen readers finish it, they’re encouraged by the protagonist. That they’re asking good questions about their own lives. That there’s a general feeling they just went on an adventure that was worth the ride.

I say all this to say: I’m much further than where I was. My lack of knowledge now isn’t a stumbling block. It’s an opportunity to take my enthusiasm to the next level. And by practicing these seven daily habits every day, I’m setting myself up for the kind of structure I need to keep building.

The goals haven’t changed much in ten years. But I have. And that makes all the difference.

Day 13: One Brick at a Time (And Why Compound Interest Changes Everything)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

One of the things I’m learning most on the 7-40 Challenge—and what excites me most—is seeing how daily goals turn into long-term progress.

Here’s the math: A 1% improvement every single day compounds to a 37x return in a year. That’s not motivation speak. That’s mathematics.

You can erode a foundation one brick at a time. Well, you can also build one brick at a time. The principle is the same—small, consistent actions create massive results over time.

The Thirty-Year Dream

I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was fourteen years old. That’s over thirty years of “someday I’ll do that.”

Thirty years of wishing. Failed attempts. Abandoned drafts. Good intentions that never materialized.

In the late 2000s, I wrote a small children’s Christmas book—about ten to fifteen pages. I was proud of it. I think it sold two copies. But that wasn’t the dream. I wanted a full-on, full-length novel.

Last year, I finally decided I was going to do it.

It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought.

How It Actually Happened

Here’s the thing about writing a novel: you write a scene. You read it over. You write some more. The story keeps building. You have a decent idea, you turn it into a better idea through revision and notes. And gradually, something really cool emerges.

But it still follows this principle: you have to have repeatable daily goals and tangible milestones you can accomplish every single day to build toward larger goals.

They don’t just happen. You have to actually make time for them.

I started small. One scene at a time. One chapter at a time. I kept building, and before I knew it, I had a complete first draft: 105 chapters.

Where I Am Now

It’s a YA novel about teens with superpowers in the nineties. I’m not going to tell you more than that yet—I’m in the editing process and want to roll it out properly. But here’s what matters:

I’m currently revising chapters 61 through 65. That means I’m over halfway through the revision process on a 105-chapter manuscript.

Thirty years of “someday.” One year of actual work. And now, halfway through polishing something I’m genuinely proud of.

Why The 7-40 Challenge Made This Possible

This is why the 7-40 Challenge has been perfect for this season. I work on seven daily habits. I’ll keep working on these seven daily habits. And in my creative hour, I continue to refine and revise this novel.

One chapter at a time. One day at a time. Compound interest in action.

By early this year, I’ll be working on getting it submitted for publication or publishing it myself. We’ll see what unfolds.

But what I know for sure is this: the dream didn’t change. My daily actions did.

For thirty years, I talked about writing a novel. Last year, I started. This year, I’m finishing.

That’s not luck. That’s compound interest. That’s one brick at a time.

Day 13 Scorecard: ✅ Bible study ✅ Exercise (Walking) ✅ Reading ✅ Calories ✅ Water ✅ Gratitude ✅ Creative hour (chapters 61-65 )

Thirteen consecutive perfect days. One brick at a time.

The best time to start building? Not looking back to what I should have done thirty years ago. Not someday. Now.

See you tomorrow for Day 14.