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.
033/365 09/23/2025
There’s a side entrance. The side entrance avoids all the risks. No receptionist. No security guard. No prying eyes. No questions about the night before, day ahead, coming weekend. Nothing that lets them get their curious claws into the cracks of your life. So yes, it’s the side entrance. Gray door on a gray sidewalk on the building’s quiet side. Few cars. The puttering of a delivery van that’s seen better days. We should tape this door. Eye twitch pressing the fob against the dull black square affixed to the concrete wall. The interminable wait. Milliseconds flashing across the mind’s timer, time unspooling in a mote of fear. Maybe this time it won’t work? Maybe this is the time it makes no sound and the small red light flashes defeat?
Success! Three gleeful beeps and the clunk deep inside the door’s metal sandwich. We’re in.
032/365 09/22/2025
There were times Wilford Maines didn’t want to get up. Cock crowed, faint light coming in through the thin curtain he’d hung in the one-room cabin, and his whole being would say, “Wilford, you don’t gotta move. You can just lay here on the cot and take your breath and you ain’t gotta do nothin.” He’d lay and stare at the ceiling and say to himself, “Ok. Ok, ok, ok.” Then with some effort and not a little noise, he’d swing his legs over the cot side and plant his aching feet on the warped floorboards. That was step one.
031/365 09/21/2025
Trapped! And for something so stupid, too. Like, one of those moments where you set your passport in the little pocket of the interior door handle. Not even the actual storage bin. Just the little thing up top. You can look down at it sitting there. And you can think, that’s probably a bad idea. And then later you can realize you were totally right because you’re in a hotel bar checking your pockets in a panic.
030/365 09/20/2025
The afternoon breezes had begun to stir, and the smell of roses and lavender rode the rustling branches up from the garden and into the drawing room. Aunt Dowager carefully threaded her needle through the <ring thing used for needlepoint> and listened to the rhythmic lilt as Elizabeth recited her verse.
Oh these poor girls, she thought. And without reprimand from her mind as she was known throughout Hollipshire as a woman capable of honest assessment and blunt consideration. She looked up from the needlepoint to Ruth in the corner, struggling to capture any semblance of the outside world with her watercolors. And poor inelegant Lucy struggling through finger exercises on the harpsichord, her lips rounding around each letter of her scales.
029/365 09/19/2025
When they finally turn off the last lights in the Pasco County Community Rec center, I’m still on the locker room floor. Locker room. Stretch and a half. Just some room off a tan hallway probably used for arts and crafts other nights of the week. Not big enough for bingo.
I used to hate the echoing clunk of the those last lights going out. The true end of the night. Now I kinda like the quiet.
In the dark I take an inventory:
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.