For someone who’s written 204,731 words worth of emails over the past year…and 10,805 words of a novel over the past two weeks…writing the first sentence of this article sure took forever.
But seeing as I have my first paying customer within HOURS of launching this newsletter, I’d better deliver the goods.
Enough preamble:
Welcome to the first edition of Daddy Writes A Book.
You’re here to (presumably) watch a working dad squeeze out his first book in between running an email marketing business, feeding his daughter buttermilk waffles, and wandering through Asia and Europe with his wife.
Well…
I don’t aim to disappoint.
It’s going to be hard. It’s already hard. But that’s why it’s fun.
You’re probably working on a book yourself, or maybe you want to start writing a book. Fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t really matter. Books are books.
(I’ve even found there to be loads of overlap between sales writing and fiction.)
Or, maybe you just like reading. Who can blame you, you literate son of a gun?
In any case:
If I can pull this off, anyone can. Yes, you too.
First of all, WHY am I doing this?
I’ve had the skeleton of a novel floating around in my head since late 2024. Back then, it existed as a rough outline based on a welcome sequence I was building for my brand-new email list.
Yes, a WELCOME sequence. Meaning, marketing emails.
I’d brainstormed an entire fictional UNIVERSE as part of my marketing business.
…
It’s a long story.
There’s a fantastic email copywriter by the name of Daniel Throssell who built a fictional adventure into his welcome sequence. The first email…which, for most businesses would say something like “Welcome, thanks for subscribing,” went off the rails.
He kidnapped you.
He kidnapped ME.
He sticks the reader in a jail cell where a fictional version of himself interrogates you. Over the course of several later emails, you embark on an adventure involving robots, guns, jetpacks…it’s bizarre.
Bizarre and entertaining.
Anyway, I wanted to incorporate fantastical elements into my own welcome sequence. I had a whole miniature lore bible and 7 emails written up.
I was about to launch.
Then I realized…
“This is mega weird.”
Weird for marketing emails, I mean. So I shelved the idea. I wrote a tamer, more traditional welcome sequence with fewer wizards and spell tomes.
(ZERO wizards, in fact.)
But I still loved the ideas I’d come up with in my lore bible. I kept turning them over in my head…slowly and steadily…all throughout 2025. This world wasn’t going away.
This year, in early February, I had a revelation. I want to tell you I woke up in a cold sweat, sprinted to my castle tower study, and started scribbling out the first draft with a quill in the moonlight. But that’s not really what happened.
What really happened was the world I’d built started coalescing around an idea.
That idea was so far removed from the original purpose of my brainstorming—marketing emails—that there’s no way I’d have arrived at the same conclusion a year ago.
It took a year of irregular, internal brainstorming and scattered note-taking to realize there’s actually a story here to tell.
And the one-line summary of that story is this:
A mailman delivers a self-addressed birthday card to a missing little girl.
(It gets a whole lot weirder after that.)
Not exactly a compelling sales pitch for a marketing newsletter, but it might make a great novel someday.
The more this idea crystallized, the more I thought:
“I must write this story.”
I started dreaming of my story.
I started waking up in the morning thinking of the story.
Finally, my must-plan-out-ever-detail-in-advance brain gave in to “I must write this story.”
A couple weeks ago, I started writing. I’m sitting at 10,805 words and multiple chapters deep. Every scene I write is better than the last. The characters feel alive. The dialogue feels real. The plot makes sense.
It’s coming together.
And I’m bringing you along with me.