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.
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.
004/365 08/25/2025
He called himself King of Cats and had a makeshift throne down on Watson that he’d cobbled from an old Fury. He sat don there with his coffee crown and paper towel scepter. Royal armor of license plates and welder’s gloves. All day he sat and sweated and called to the cats and to the kids. Nonsense, mostly, but from time to time burst with oration like channelling a god.
003/365 08/24/2025
“Sometimes dying is like a race state.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a thing from computers where they get ahead of themselves and two things end up tripping themselves up. Like cancer and hard living. But for computers.”
Jackson was always saying fucked up shit like that, and half the time I think he was full of shit. The other half, though, he wasn’t.
002/365 08/23/2025
It’s the slow creep of squalor what gets you. You leave the kitchen door open and the chickens get in. And they’re shitting on things. Not much, maybe, but some. And pretty soon that old hound pisses on the floor and everyone just looks at it. You get used to the smell, mostly. Except Granny. She never could, which is why I suppose she left the way she did.
001/365 08/22/2025
…and the rains came, and filled the strewn mountain streets, the surging current building from the summit and cascading down and down through the town: pigs and old newspapers, jerry cans and fish nets. Collected all and brought them down the mountain to deposit them at Alphonso’s meager door. The next day, he left for America.