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.
232/365 04/11/2026
He’d call us, sometimes, when he’d been out on the rig a while. Tell us to go outside and look up at the moon.
231/365 04/10/2026
It had been ages since the virus, and most of us kids thought our grands awful odd.
230/365 04/09/2026
We rode west across the prairies until the rockies appeared like a <tktk thread tktk> on the horizon. Pa pulled the reins to slow the mules, and we all got out and felt the earth and grasses and wind. “Caleb,” Pa said, “Grab two stakes and walk with me.” He stood gazing north, his hard eyes alight with figuring.
229/365 04/08/2026
Sadie the cat wasn’t too tough. She’d bully one little patchwork thing and run him off. But all the raccoons and other cats, it took one of us standing behind her to give her courage. Once she saw the other creature begin to slink off, she’d fluff up and do a little side-ways bounce across the grass a ways, and then act all pleased with herself for giving the extra oomph to send the critter skittering.
227/365 04/06/2026
There were four of us that year, and we all drove out to the desert. We wanted the wide-open space of it. The heat and dry. The beautiful, punishing landscape.
226/365 04/05/2026
To live in pain is to live partially inside yourself, always. To mask and smile and say, “Fine, thank you,” while a piece of you works to inventory each sensation. The dull throb like a too-big heart beating in your hip. The threat of a hot, sharp stab if you move a certain way. The way your leg might feel for a brief moment, detached and floating away from your body, the absence of sensation signaling the arrival of a new sensation where bone grinds bone, which clamps your teeth together and sends a sickening scrape through your very center.
There is nothing like pain to make you aware of yourself in space, as a body, both inside and out.
225/365 04/04/2026
Every morning he woke up with a gasp for breath, t-shirt collar soaked in cold sweat and his heart racing, a rushing in his ears. 3:38 in rude, red digits on the clock radio. The same time, like some sick clockwork.