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.
050/365 10/10/2025
Hamilton Rat called the meeting to order. “My fellow denizens!” He raised himself as much as he could on the little dais, built in the small, brick hall out of two old textbooks and a sardine tin. He cleared his throat to quiet some murmurs in the back. There were geckos back there, he was sure of it. All nervous energy and flitting movements. A full hush fell over the domed enclave. “For too long we have been relegated to shadow!”
049/365 10/09/2025
What if we started after she got better?
I’m not sure what you mean.
I mean, so many times we start when things begin to turn. When the discovery happens. At the moment of doomed surprise. Or even before that. When things are fine. When there are moments of quiet and happiness and regular sadness that’s not easy to deal with, but that doesn’t swell and swell and soak the world like wet woolens. What if we skipped all of that and just started after? Once she was better?
I don’t know.
Neither do I.
048/365 10/08/2025
The bag men come at night. Thump, thump, thump, they thump to drums, drums, drums. I can hear them. Cresting hills. Slogging through swamp. They come and come and come.
Preacher Daniel tells me the bag men aren’t real. He tells me it’s my imagination. And then shhh, shhhh, shhh…be brave, little girl. You’re so brave. Then it just smells like wool and wine and whathaveyou. That’s the word Ms. Grackle uses when she can’t think of what comes next. I like to use it, too, when I can’t think of what comes next.
047/365 10/07/365
This? This was all territory back then. Not a state for as far as the eye could see. And you can see the eye could see far. What’s that? You can see because it was sea. Or seaway, I guess. That’s the technical term. But that was long, long before it was even territory.
Dig here, in the earth. You can feel it. Eons and eons of fish and plankton and plants filtering down and down into the deep to make this soil. Sea soil. Feel it.
046/365 10/06/2025
They arrived in the village well after midnight, having hitchhiked from the last remaining town marked on their map. The driver, a weathered man behind the wheel of an ancient Tatra 138 first told them they didn’t want to go there. Then, after some cajoling, he agreed to take them through, but wouldn’t be pulling over. “I not stop,” he said in halting English. “I slow down very much, but no stopping.” The two of them agreed, and hefted themselves into the truck bed and settled in between crates of cabbages and chickens.
045/365 10/05/2025
Fighter jets screamed across the sky, east to west and I began the count..one, two, three…I made it to seven before I heard the whine and boom of missiles and knew the front was a just a little bit closer that day.
044/365 10/04/2025
…and then God said, “Watch this,” and the angels giggled in their robes, and God let loose upon the land a great flood that swallowed all earth and trees and men and beasts alike.
And Gabriel said, “Uh….there’s nothing left.”
And God said, “Ooops! My bad,” and lo, did he reverse the earth and heavens and spin backwards all existence to the time just before the flood. And he said unto the angels, “Am I drunk? Michael, did you put something in this?” And his hand alighted on the golden goblet to his right.
“I can’t even remember,” Michael said, and his voice was beautiful and terrible and shook the grounds and celestial spheres so all on earth trembled in awe and fear.
And God questioned the angels, and tested their wisdom and faith of him and his decisions, “So who should I pick to survive?”
043/365 10/03/2025
The jungle. From our wallpapered comfort in the halls of the Explorers’ Society, we could envision it sprawled across the continent, horizon to horizon. We talked of its lush green. The bright white birds flying in small flocks across the verdant canopy. The cut of blue-green through the trees that would be the jungle’s meandering lifeblood river. Yes, in the high-backed leather chairs, our pipes and brandy snifters close at hand, the jungle was mysterious and beautiful. All lush promise and inviting possibility.
When we finally made it to her cruel shores, however, our vision went from those imagined aerial views of paradise to the dark, tangled, grounded view full of noise and wet and darkness.
042/365 10/02/2025
The scull eased into the water without sound. The still water’s edge rimmed lavender with dawn’s reflection. There was reverence in this moment. Lungfuls of cool, dry air. Not even birds yet awake. But here we are. To see us from afar you might think we’re soldiers recently returned. Just underweight but strong enough. Skinny muscle. Sinew.
041/365 10/01/2025
The hunting store sold me a full set of ghillie camouflage, which seemed like overkill, but they maintained top to bottom it was the kind used by the world’s top sniper teams and that absolutely no one anywhere would see me coming. And I could hide in plain sight and bag turkey, deer, whatever. They had me try it on and everything.
It was pretty impressive. “What about raccoons?” I asked. I was doing the little back-and-forth thing in the three-way mirror, seeing how it looked on the back side. And it really was like someone had just turned me into a moss monster.
“Excuse me?” The nice woman manning the place asked me to repeat myself. Not sure, but I guess maybe the whole fuzzy headdress thing makes it hard to get my voice out.
“Raccoons,” I said more clearly. “What about bagging raccoons?”