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.
058/365 10/18/2025
In the kingdom of Moribund, in the village of Quill, there lived a small and petulant child. Her name was Raven Blackspell, and all agreed she was a terror, even her mother.
057/365 10/17/2025
The car sputtered and jerked and rolled to a stop about four miles outside of Barstow. The wife had warned me about renting an old clunker, but it had seemed so right and so good to take the ’76 Eldorado across the desert in this pursuit of adventure. I stared up at the sun and out to the road as car after car after truck after car whizzed by on I-15.
My son looked up from his phone. “Why’d we stop?”
I fuckin hated that kid, sometimes.
056/365 10/16/2025
Glen Abbott knotted the pillowcase and tied it off with three feet of river-black paracord. He tied the paracord’s other end to a cinderblock and slid the cinderblock and pillowcase into the tannic waters near the middling Cyprus. He didn’t take a photo or mark it on a map. Just looked and looked and looked as he counted to thirty. Marked the stars and the date and picked up the wet paddle. As his canoe slid silently through the dark water, he said three prayers and made a wish.
055/365 10/15/2025
There’s a story that ends with the snow silently falling, falling. Fat flakes falling and covering in drifts the stairs and curbs and cars and limbs. The stark park trees made magic by falling snow.
054/365 10/14/2025
“Here’s something for ya.” He leaned in close across the table. He had pretty good eyes and an easy smile. His hands were smallish, but he moved them precisely. Adjusting his fork just so and passing the salt and pepper shakers together. “The human mind necessitates a certain amount of memorized alphanumeric characters. Like now, we got all our passwords and PIN numbers—but it should be just PINs, since it stands for Personal Identification Number and who would say Personal Identification Number number?” He let out a soft chuckle. “But now we have all those. And before, people memorized phone numbers! You’d have a whole contacts list in your head. And then before that it was distances and weights and measures because people cared about all those things, and before that you’d have to make sure you kept count of all your seeds and sheep and water barrels and your neighbors’ and everything you’d need to be alive. That’s why it’s such a panic when you can’t remember one of those things. Because we’re evolutionarily predisposed to need them. For survival.” He sat back and smiled like he was sure he’d opened up heaven itself and bestowed me with god’s own wisdom.
It was our second date.
053/365 10/13/2025
It was two years after our father had received an official diagnosis that my sister and I finally found out about it. Completely unrelated, I’d logged into his health portfolio and found the letter of diagnosis: incipient Alzheimer’s. When my sister confronted him with the letter, he calmly folded the letter in half, slid it into the smart leather folio he always carried with him, and said, calmly, “This is ridiculous. I’ll just have to sue for wrongful diagnosis.” At the time, there were few symptoms that couldn’t be assigned to Aging Professor. The small forgettings.
052/365 10/12/2025
“What’ll ya have, what’ll ya have, what’ll ya have?” The chant of the hod dog man by his cart clear and keening above traffic’s din and the murmur of people in half-distracted conversation.
051/365 10/11/2025
Hector Ruiz loved Magdela with all his heart. At the art institute he found himself floating in eddies of her wake as she glided across the plaza. Skipped class to be near her during study times. Watched her come aglow as evening descended and the light danced itself through the olive and oleander leaves.
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.