In July, 2025, I began participating in the Tom Sachs/NikeCraft ISRU Summer Camp. This series of challenges was designed to help break bad habits (mostly the phone addiction) and forge new rituals. One ritual, Output Before Input, asked us to create first thing. Eyes open; set pen, pencil, crayon, etc. to paper, cardboard, wood, your cat. Didn’t matter. What mattered most was putting something into the world before letting too much of the world into you. I began with a normal ritual: a simple record of the day before: things I remembered, things I didn’t want to forget. But honestly? That was boring. On August 22, I thought, “What if I wrote openings every day? What if every day I started a novel? What if I did it for a year?”
That’s what we have here (so far). Every one is a shitty first draft. Some shittier than others.
The process: I wake and then scribble in a notebook. About once a week—every couple-few days—I type them up here, unchanged. I have no idea if I’ll ever do anything with them. If you’d like to do something with one of them, please feel free.
364/365 08/21/2026
The Sunday fish fry began before dawn. My grandfather and I padded through the farmhouse in socked feet, exited quietly to the back porch where we slid into wading boots and gently lifted our poles from the small rack above the windows.
363/365 08/20/2026
The booze, the booze, the booze. The booze was the balm. The salve. The thing that kept him going through the day. The promise of 5 pm and the floating, numbing reprieve of all that ailed him.
362/365 08/19/2026
The Architect sped through the English countryside, hands loose on the wheel of his Jaguar E. He scanned the road ahead, taking in and filing each detail: the way the border wall weathered on the road’s south side. He took in the trees across the landscape: alder and cedar, cherry and ash.
361/365 08/18/2026
Harry Landowne ran marathons. It was his thing. His identity. He had the 26.2 sticker on the back of his car (though just the one. He was not, in fact, a monster). And he traveled around the world’s most famous marathons. If not as participant, then as spectator and visiting friend: New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin.
360/365 08/17/2026
It was, they said, the most important election of our time. But it was hard to get excited. Every election for last 20 years had been labeled the same: “The most important election of our time,” the language used once to grab attention so many years ago, and editors since incapable of allowing themselves—or the language—a rest.
357/365 08/14/2026
The heat wave came, settled on the city, and all the studios offered only hot yoga.
“God, who I wouldn’t kill for regular yoga,” Hyacinth said.
Agnes opened the apartment window and stuck her hand out into the air. “OMG right?” She did it again. “I swear there’s no difference between outside and in. We should just turn off the AC and open the windows.”
“What?” Hyacinth went to the window, stuck her arm out. “You’re insane. It feels totally different.” She motioned back towards the kitchen area. “Go stand over there, and then come back here and do it again.”
356/365 08/13/2026
There was an author Hugo particularly disliked. Not as a writer, though he considered her prose needlessly dense and a-tonal, and not as person, though he did harbor some slight resentment for the quirky upbringing she’d enjoyed. No, Hugo disliked the author, whose name is Rebecca Quinn (but not that Rebecca Quinn), as an author, with all the trappings and Wikipedia facts that came with it.