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.
194/365 03/04/2026
There was a brief moment—a Tuesday. Home from work, out of the car, house key in hand but not yet near the lock. On the porch, weather good, briefcase forgotten on the back seat. The idea of martini without any hassle of making one. And in that moment—for that one brief, glorious moment, Edmunt Glenfale wasn’t angry.
It passed of course. Like a ghost wandering through him in the night. The brief, elated feeling: this ain’t bad.
193/365 03/03/2026
The sun crested the horizon and bathed the ice fields in a cold, white glow. Seaman First Class Harry Winthrop stood on the forecastle and watched the shadows appear—long spikes of darker darkness reaching for the boat. It was six weeks now they’d been trapped in the ice, and the constant groans told all on board the ice was pressing in.
192/365 03/02/2026
The war front shambled across the countryside as is following the stumbling journey of some drunkard giant. Here and there the path followed a river line, skirted hills outside a town. But otherwise it undulated from city to town to village to farm, no one knowing where it might stumble next. Groceries were a crap shoot. People went to sleep in one country, woke up in another. And somehow we were expected to show up to work.
190/365 02/28/2026
We didn’t know it growing up, but our father was a spider. Growing up, he just seemed a nice man with long arms and legs who worked at the factory and took us kids out west every late summer, just before school was set to begin again. Now, things are much more clear.
188/365 02/26/2026
The lawn, the lawn, the lawn. The lawn was beautiful. A solid mass of green arcing gently across the .25 acres from the back fence to street at the end of the walkway. Night-blooming jasmine on a trellis in the back yard, a gorgeous crepe myrtle that bloomed riotous pink in springtime.
187/365 02/25/2026
Our dad liked fires in winter. It didn’t matter we lived in Florida. It didn’t matter the weather outside was a bright, offensive 80 degrees. He would clap his hands gleefully some time after Thanksgiving. Declare it was a fine night for a fire in the fireplace. He said it like that” “Kids,” he’s day, “I think tonight’s a fine night for a fire in the fireplace. Help me gather supplies.” This meant my sister and I had to find old newspapers and search the yard for twigs. Our dad would gather logs from the pile out back of the garage.
186/365 02/24/2026
The run-off from the Sam’s Club parking lot—this cigarette butt, let’s say—the run-off, rain-swept across the asphalt, enters the storm drain, sluices through pipes and dumps into Hogtown Creek. There, the water winds its way through neighborhoods across sand, limestone and clay until it dumps into Paynes Prairie where it seeps down and down through karst landscape to find subterranean caves and drips in the dark to land on the back of a slumbering beast now soon set to awaken.
185/365 02/23/2026
The wind howled across the mountain .Our portaledges bounced against the granite face, and sleet and rain dripped from our weather flies to land some 2,200 feet below on the last piece of horizontal land we’d encountered.