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.
028/365 09/18/2025
When the van broke down outside Topeka, we were pretty much done. Petey’d messed up his hand and was drumming half-speed. Lucas found out his girlfriend was maybe pregnant? So he’d lost some focus. We’d racked up over 50 driving hours, and fewer and fewer people were showing up for the shows.
027/365 09/17/2025
..and then at some point the phone stopped ringing. No agent calls, no manager check-ins. No friends with exciting news. Days devolved into staring at the ceiling, moving a chair from this side to the other. Watching the pool robot hum its monotone tune as it floated in the pristine, unused water. The cat died. Bottles piled up. The robe became all-comfort. The rasp of turning pages seemed to fill the whole house, and on Sundays the whine of leaf blowers far, far down the palm-lined block didn’t start until well past a reasonable hour. There was no reason to call and complain.
026/365 09/16/2025
The desert stretched as far as he could see in every direction. To quadrants 1 and 2, nothing but dunes, geologic ocean swells of coarse sand like hardened saw teeth. Quadrant 3, the sand gave way like water on a shore to a hard rock plain, flat and unforgiving in the sun. Quadrant 4 provided some shade. Giant rocks cast up and large cracks ripped into the crust by some kind of volcanic event long, long ago.
The wind whistled through his starship’s busted hull, and he worked to collect strewn supplies. Useful things and things he hoped he could make useful. He’d missed his landing site by, what? 35,000 bosuns? Almost exactly on the planet’s opposite side. But who knew? Maybe someone would come looking for him. Maybe they spotted his fiery trail as his ship flamed out across the sky. If they found him, though, that also meant he was caught.
025/365 09/15/2025
The Davenports of Charleston arrived not 100 years after the city’s founding. Charles Davenport, second son of Arthur Davenport, made his way across the Atlantic and founded a large planation. Through the years, the Davenports rose to prominence as ranchers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, politicians, and their influence grew from Charleston up to Charlotte and down to Savannah and beyond. It was once said that no continent was free of a Davenport’s influence.
Johnny Bertram Davenport is not of those Davenports.
024/365 09/14/2025
The eyes will tell you where you’re supposed to be. Where it’s safe. Where it’s not. The deep brown of cow and deer. The feisty black of cardinal or bluejay. Even the beautiful, translucent umber of the golden eagle says it’s safe. Predators? Wary, sure. But it’s ok. There is menace in the bobcat’s eyes. The cougar’s piercing stare. But you can see the soul there. Know in your bones the recognition. You see the bobcat and know him. The bobcat sees you and knows you.
Not so the deep. The creatures you can find there. The dead stone black of the great white. It doesn’t fix you in its stare. By the time you see it eye to eye it has smelled you, known your shape in the water.
023/365 09/13/2025
Look here, the options. Even for coffee. Ground or whole bean. And ground? Course, fine, espresso. Whole bean there’s the burr grinder, another grinder forgotten in the back of a cabinet along with the first moka pot bought and forgotten and replaced with a second (not as good). The second sits on the counter next to the kettle, French press, drip machine. Over there, the espresso maker (bought on sale). The man, 50’s. Tallish, in good enough shape from a gym four times a week and evening jogs. Places one hand atop his head and stares at his watch, seconds ticking. Considers the choice barrage of this morning (and all mornings, if we’re honest) and wonders why he couldn’t maybe get to winnowing.
022/365 09/12/2025
The Starlet. Shall we compare thee to a summer’s day? Wish that we could be a glove upon that hand? That hand upon that cheek? How about one piece of originality as we stare, transfixed: she extends delicate fingers out and out and out, and doesn’t pick up the wine glass. Oh, no. As she listens with rapt attention (faked?) to the producer as he guffaws his way through some kind of tale, heaving and thens between gasping breaths—and then, and then, and then—when we all know it should be but or therefore. But we get ahead of ourselves.
The Starlet extends one delicate hand out and out and out like a movie spaceman. That kind of delicate speed and motion. And she alights a fingertip delicately (so delicately) on the wine glass’ rim, her smile radiating. Eyes glistening and grabbing attention from all over the room. The simple move. The finger tip. Our hearts swell, and we are in love.
021/365 09/11/2025
When it comes time to run, you just gotta run. Just like you practiced. There’s no time to think in the night. No time to stop and get your bearings. You run. You count steps. You cross the field. You count five in the shadow of the old hangin tree. You listen for dogs. Then it’s 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 steps down though the gulley and to the wagon wheel. You grab the shoes there and mark the red star. Pick through the two trees you can barely see, and that’ll get you to the root ball. Put on the shoes there. You’re gonna need ‘em for the next part.
020/365 09/10/2025
You can’t write a novel about skateboarding. It’s too big. Too unwieldy. What’re you going to do? Write about the Gelfand kid in Florida who soared without touching his board? Follow a scrappy team from Venice as they bring the ocean on to land? Track the trials and tribulations of one person as he (or she) suffers setbacks on the way to the olympics? How about a summer camp in Sweden as one man, career beginning to fade, decides he absolutely, positively must come up with a new trick so he can stay relevant for a few more years? Where are you even going to start?
Us? We’ll start here: In the beginning, man invented the wheel.
019/365 09/09/2025
We met in a little office front down on Houston. Every Tuesday. There was me, Marc, and Patton. Salt, who was the oldest of us. He got dropped off in a big white van, the warning beeps filling all the corners of the neighborhood as they slowly lowered his chair from the van to the ground and wheeled him in. There was a guy who introduced himself as Geoff, but it always took him a second to respond to that name, like first he had to remember he’d asked us to call him that. And then a rotating group of guys who came in and out as they got lonely or scared or had questions about things or needed a little atta boy: Mike, Scott, Jerome, Ling. You can fill it out however you want, really. It was a diverse bunch, the irregulars. We took in all kinds.