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.
065/365 10/25/2025
The very first thing I remember is a club. The smooth warmth of the wood in my hand. The hefty swing of it. I’m crouched low in grasses tall as my eyes and sneaking slowly towards a great brown beast. I can hear its breathing. The long rumble of an in and out. Looking now, I can see it must have been terrified. Mystified. It ran and ran and ran as best it could, but I still came. My brothers and I still came across the plains. Standing monkeys who could walk and walk and walk and walk. Ever coming. Never tired. And now we would feast. Now we would eat for months. I remember my hand gripped the club. I remember the weight of it as I crept through the tall grasses.
064/365 10/24/2025
I got all my friends in here: Glenda the Good Witch; Alfonso, who’s a graffiti artist. Beckman Houndstooth III who advises me on crypto buys and handles some of my above-board portfolio investments; Vladdy The Pick who handles my crypto sells and additional portfolio investments. Girlfriend Claudia, Girlfriend Miko, Girlfriend Sally Ann. The Ol’ Colonel. 10-Gallon Slim. A half-finished model that’s mostly the good bits from my mother. All right here. All within reach.
063/365 10/23/2025
Starlight 111 picked up a distress signal 538 days into its seventh mission. The ship was dark. The crew pods’ instrument panels dim and displaying heart and oxygen levels of the members in suspended animation. Myles 652 sat at the controls, his long limbs limp. Spidery and flat grey.
062/365 10/22/2025
We all felt different that summer, though different for different reasons. With the university on break, Becca’s parents decided to go ahead with their divorce. Abbie finally broke up with Dale. Michelle’s cat died. Debbie dropped acid and spent eight hours staring at a rainbow that was in the sky for 20 minutes, tops, and then wouldn’t stop talking about the universe within the universe. And I just woke up one day and decided I didn’t like my friends anymore.
061/365 10/21/2025
Over the years, Abigail Stockton had come to a deep and abiding distrust of second sons. Second sons, she had determined, were the worst.
060/365 10/20/2025
They called it The Castle, though it lacked moat, parapets, murder holes (on the outside) or most of the trappings you would associate with the image that springs to mind when someone says “Castle.” It was, simply, a large, gleaming-white concrete cube nearly 200 meters on a side without visible windows and two sets of double doors set into the north-facing side. The east and west sides were blank; the south side marred by single, dark gray door atop four concrete steps. The emergency exit.
The Castle’s most castle-like feature was it’s placement: high above the village of Baden-Baden atop Badener Höhe: aloof, imposing and completely and totally secure.
059/365 10/19/2025
The cotton fields outside Johnston City stretched as far as they eye could see. And though the laws of the last 80 years made it harder, there was still money to be made in America.
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.