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.
083/365 11/12/2025
How do we open a novel? What considerations must be made to compel the reader from one sentence to the next? To continue, paragraph after paragraph? To feel the book’s weight in their hands (because the book should be in their hands) and think, Yes. This is right and correct and I will keep going? Do we start at sunrise? Sunset? Rain or shine? Squall at sea? English countryside? What about a woman bereft? A woman bereft and feeling brittle and drinking tea from a filigreed cup because she believes women bereft and brittle can soothe themselves with tea? See her hands tremble? It’s barely noticeable to the untrained eye, but we are trained. We can zoom in. Bring our perspective closer and closer until the cup’s gold rim is like the ocean’s horizon, and we watch it tremble ever so slightly as if the earth were quaking some miles below.
082/365 11/11/2025
There came a day each spring when the old man finally dragged himself back down to Central Park to remind himself of youth’s shocking beauty. The gorgeous leaps of young men catching footballs and frisbees. The flexing thighs of young women on roller skates. The smooth, delicious shoulder begging like a ripe apple to be bitten.
081/365 11/10/2025
To break the routine, Ignatz K- sometimes declared antagonism days where, upon waking, he would stare down at his orange tabby, Max, and say, “Max! Antagonism day!” And would then curse the cat with a string of expletives so offensive it would sometimes make him blush. The cat remained nonplussed and often returned Ignatz’s obscene tirade (delivered in a high-pitched, cutesy voice) with three slow blinks and a soft meow as if to say, “That’s nice, now can we get on to my food, please?”
080/365 11/09/2025
The house on Bleeker was positively porous. Everything outside eventually came in: heat, wet, cold. The walls inside sweated with damp. The floors got spongy in late summer, brittle as driftwood by January.
079/365 11/08/2025
This is a tale from when the ice didn’t come. When we spent the year waiting for the cold crystalline to creep across our fields and forests. Peaks and valleys. This was the year we waited for what did not appear, and our people’s parched throats that followed.
078/365 11/07/2025
Chapter 1
In which we discover our intrepid heroes and witness as they set upon their journey
The morning sun had not yet cleared the poplars at field’s edge, but Merle knew the day would be bright and warm.
077/365 11/06/2025
Mostly you can get by without having to shoot anyone. Most folks get up to bad business, it’s not their fault. It’s not their intent. Fights, petty stealing, all that stuff don’t normally warrant a shoot out. I show up, show ‘em the badge, and things settle down. Items get returned. Morris spends a night in the drunk tank, and the next day the sun come up and everyone gets back to their own business.
076/365 11/05/2025
Seeking: A hot 60. Widowed. Kids grown and gone. You, rattling around in a large house with a good number of weekend projects to do. Mostly electrical and cosmetic. Some plumbing. 80/20 interior/exterior. Enjoys travel. We’ll pool resources. Hire sexy maid, gardener, pool boy. All will become points of contention (obv). We’ll have high turnover.
075/365 11/04/2025
The starlight handlers, in the heavenly rookeries, worked their daytime magic, separating light from dark. They scooped the cosmic grain in their spiral winnowing trays and tossed the darkness chaff across the heavens and scattered wheat stars to dry across the celestial spheres.
074/365 11/03/2025
You can want to be king all you want. But kings are born, son. They aren’t made. Pa and me were working on the Harvester, the smell of oil and grease and hay all around us. The afternoon was clear and bright and not too hot, and Pa had the hoses he’d already taken out on the right and the hoses he was going to put in on the left. All laid out on a blanket on the ground in the order they were supposed to go in: left to right on the ground, front to back on the Harvester. But imagine if you didn’t want to be king but had to anyway? He turned his blue eyes on me. They could be hard but now they were kind and danced with a certain mischief. You don’t get to choose. One day someone dies and suddenly you’re king with all the shit that entails. And there’s nothing you can do about it.