In July, 2025, I began participating in the Tom Sachs/NikeCraft ISRU Summer Camp. This series of challenges were 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).
I wake and then write in a notebook. About once a week—every couple-few days—I type them here. 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.
014/365 09/04/2025
We are the compilers. More than job, more than calling. Our very being belongs to compiling.
Everything, everything, everything: birthdays and death days. Favorite foods, tax statuses, driving records. Record drives, safety records, records ranked safe to buy. Colors, fabrics, detergents, washers large and small. Test scores, shoe sizes (even European). Mothers’ affairs. Mothers’ brothers’ affairs. Mothers’ brothers’ mistresses’ affairs, even. All affairs anywhere, sordid or splendid, all sorted. All displayed as we sit with steepled fingers and watch the data come in.
013/365 09/03/2025
The husband drove. The wife sat in the passenger seat and stared out the window. Outside the minivan, rolling hills and clapboard barns and little white houses tucked into too-green groves. It was all too green.
“It’s weird how green everything is,” she said.
The husband pressed “scan” on the radio.
012/365 09/02/2025
Daddy lost his job in December. Momma said she never understood why they did folks like that. Why they couldn’t wait till after Christmas and whatnot, but Daddy just said that’s the way things get done and he was sure they had their reasons. Momma stayed mad at him for five days after that one. Not because he lost his job but because he wouldn’t be mad about it and said they had their reasons. Momma was mad a lot.
011/365 09/01/2025
The sky above was pale gray and bare trees thrust up towards the clouds, stark and dark and hard as dead coral. The motorcade moved slowly through the rolling hills of tombstones and a clutch of mourners, huddled in black and small against the landscape, waited and watched.
010/365 08/31/2025
Th Calabassas County pumpkin pie eating contest at the county’s fall festival was the event at the event. And Harley Watson had failed to win for the third year in a row.
009/365 08/30/2025
Morning. Pretty enough: chickadees and sparrows alighted in the branches, and the sun dappled through the <tree that could have chickadees and sparrows in it>. In the small cottage, seven people were dead.
Lt. Commander Elizabeth Wheelwright stood in the small, neat living room and marveled at the blood-spattered walls.
008/365 08/29/2025
This could have been the shortest novel ever: a man’s mother dies, and he takes the grief and buries it in his gut and lets his whole being harden to marble. But this man happened to fall in love.
007/365 08/28/2025
They say all happy families are the same. What they really mean is that all happy families are boring. There’s no drama there. The thing is, though, everyone’s got secrets. So when you see mom, dad and little Billy and Sally all delicately cutting into the dinner steaks and talking about their day, you’re missing cousin Harold, who can’t be ignored forever.
006/365 08/27/2025
The morning routine’s the same until it isn’t: you wake, pad floors to the kitchen to start the coffee. Feed the cats, take the old dog out to do her business, and curse the ad mailer they still leave on the driveway. Then the spaceships came.
005/365 08/26/2025
As evening fell and the streetlights pooled against the dark on Walleford Avenue, winter’s first snow began, and feathery white flakes drifted from the darkening sky. Beatrice Smalls walked quickly from light pool to light pool, unaware of the seven curses about to befall her. Unaware, too, that Grumplesnatch, Teeeth Demon of Beckoncall, would soon introduce himself and bring forth those seven curses.
“Hello.” A smooth voice came out of the dark.