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.
063/365 10/23/2025
Starlight 111 picked up a distress signal 538 days into its seventh mission. The ship was dark. The crew pods’ instrument panels dim and displaying heart and oxygen levels of the members in suspended animation. Myles 652 sat at the controls, his long limbs limp. Spidery and flat grey.
062/365 10/22/2025
We all felt different that summer, though different for different reasons. With the university on break, Becca’s parents decided to go ahead with their divorce. Abbie finally broke up with Dale. Michelle’s cat died. Debbie dropped acid and spent eight hours staring at a rainbow that was in the sky for 20 minutes, tops, and then wouldn’t stop talking about the universe within the universe. And I just woke up one day and decided I didn’t like my friends anymore.
061/365 10/21/2025
Over the years, Abigail Stockton had come to a deep and abiding distrust of second sons. Second sons, she had determined, were the worst.
060/365 10/20/2025
They called it The Castle, though it lacked moat, parapets, murder holes (on the outside) or most of the trappings you would associate with the image that springs to mind when someone says “Castle.” It was, simply, a large, gleaming-white concrete cube nearly 200 meters on a side without visible windows and two sets of double doors set into the north-facing side. The east and west sides were blank; the south side marred by single, dark gray door atop four concrete steps. The emergency exit.
The Castle’s most castle-like feature was it’s placement: high above the village of Baden-Baden atop Badener Höhe: aloof, imposing and completely and totally secure.
059/365 10/19/2025
The cotton fields outside Johnston City stretched as far as they eye could see. And though the laws of the last 80 years made it harder, there was still money to be made in America.
058/365 10/18/2025
In the kingdom of Moribund, in the village of Quill, there lived a small and petulant child. Her name was Raven Blackspell, and all agreed she was a terror, even her mother.
057/365 10/17/2025
The car sputtered and jerked and rolled to a stop about four miles outside of Barstow. The wife had warned me about renting an old clunker, but it had seemed so right and so good to take the ’76 Eldorado across the desert in this pursuit of adventure. I stared up at the sun and out to the road as car after car after truck after car whizzed by on I-15.
My son looked up from his phone. “Why’d we stop?”
I fuckin hated that kid, sometimes.
056/365 10/16/2025
Glen Abbott knotted the pillowcase and tied it off with three feet of river-black paracord. He tied the paracord’s other end to a cinderblock and slid the cinderblock and pillowcase into the tannic waters near the middling Cyprus. He didn’t take a photo or mark it on a map. Just looked and looked and looked as he counted to thirty. Marked the stars and the date and picked up the wet paddle. As his canoe slid silently through the dark water, he said three prayers and made a wish.
055/365 10/15/2025
There’s a story that ends with the snow silently falling, falling. Fat flakes falling and covering in drifts the stairs and curbs and cars and limbs. The stark park trees made magic by falling snow.
054/365 10/14/2025
“Here’s something for ya.” He leaned in close across the table. He had pretty good eyes and an easy smile. His hands were smallish, but he moved them precisely. Adjusting his fork just so and passing the salt and pepper shakers together. “The human mind necessitates a certain amount of memorized alphanumeric characters. Like now, we got all our passwords and PIN numbers—but it should be just PINs, since it stands for Personal Identification Number and who would say Personal Identification Number number?” He let out a soft chuckle. “But now we have all those. And before, people memorized phone numbers! You’d have a whole contacts list in your head. And then before that it was distances and weights and measures because people cared about all those things, and before that you’d have to make sure you kept count of all your seeds and sheep and water barrels and your neighbors’ and everything you’d need to be alive. That’s why it’s such a panic when you can’t remember one of those things. Because we’re evolutionarily predisposed to need them. For survival.” He sat back and smiled like he was sure he’d opened up heaven itself and bestowed me with god’s own wisdom.
It was our second date.