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.
070/365 10/30/2025
Like most of us, there were many things he didn’t know: didn’t know how pirates navigated the seas. Not specifically. Didn’t know the reasons for crop rotations (or only vaguely). Didn’t know the routines and customs of courtiers of the French Court or why, really, the French Court went away and then..Napoleon? What was that all about? The list went on and on: oldest settled city in Egypt. What happens when tornadoes start. What’s up with ducks?
069/365 10/29/2025
Whispers on the wind foretold of his coming. Captain Coconut Adams who outfitted his flotilla with sails painted sky blue and bedecked with palms and rocks. Ships hung with mosses and grass. Spotted lands became untrusted. Sailors seeking respite glassed the horizon and saw false islands. Sailed excitedly across the waves only to know too late they had fallen for the trap.
068/365 10/28/2025
We hid in caves and holes and barns. We hid in crawlspaces, hollowed logs, abandoned cabins high in the hills. Abandoned grocery stores, gas stations, churches and mosques. Janitors’ closets. Attics. Long-dry drain pipes now jutting high above the cracked and desiccated riverbeds. And still they came, their clicking legs and mandibles. The heat of them thrumming as they passed.
067/365 10/27/2025
In the spring of 1347, the stench of death hanging like dark angels in the cities, seven noble families journeyed southwest from Prague to seek refuge in Karlštejn Castle.
066/365 10/26/2025
And then one day they all come back outta the hills. All those folks that went up in there those years ago. They came back with their tents and their VW microbuses and all that hippie shit. We always figured they’d turn into some kind of cult and come back and try to kill us all in town. You know? That kind of thing. But they just came back down one day, and that skinny fellow, Lyle, who had been in charge in the first place, just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess it didn’t really work out.” And that was that.
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.