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.
090/365 11/19/2025
The boy began waking early. Four, sometimes three in the morning. His excitement like a thing alive inside him so lively he didn’t need an alarm. He woke, sat straight up in bed and butt-scooted down to the footboard where his clothes sat folded neatly, their own kind of potential energy radiating from them.
Clothes changed, shoes in hand, he padded downstairs and eased open the sliding glass door. Sat on the concrete to don his shoes and crept across the dewy lawn to the shed and his bike inside it.
He knew all the tricks of silence. WD-40 on the shed door rails every morning kept it gliding smooth and soundless.
089/365 11/18/2025
Back then we were all about various levels of maxing. Got those little rubber chew things as part of our looksmaxing. Scoped the best thrift places and junk shops for fashionmaxing. Our friend Max even decided to be the best version of himself and went around talking about Maxmaxing. Mostly he ate eggs?
It was dumb. We were dumb. But we were having a good time.
088/365 11/17/2025
The title Egyptologist is a bit like a nickname: it must be bestowed upon you. If one calls himself an Egyptologist, it’s widely recognized the man is a cad. Which is precisely why, when Winford Smythe came to the club and referred to himself as not only an Egyptologist, but a pre-eminent Egyptologist, we all knew he was a cad of the highest order.
086/365 11/15/2025
Sometimes, the traffic cleared just enough for him to get some speed. Twist the throttle, listen to the little one-stroke go from it’s walking-speed puk-puk-puk to a sound more akin to a dozen angry frogs all telling their names to an admiring bog. Bibbity-bibbity-bibbity-bip! When the traffic cleared, he could feel the wind. The rush of air and even the clouds of diesel exhaust didn’t matter. In those scant seconds, he was free.
085/365 11/14/2025
“I had a dream you wrote a book titled TIL: California. It was huge, like a dictionary, and I thought, ‘Well hot damn,’ and bought a copy, but I didn’t get a chance to see what was inside.”
He says things like this to me all the time. Just random bits. I count myself lucky his dream summaries are always brief.
084/365 11/13/2025
His favorite time was afterwards, at summer’s end. When the canoes and kayaks had all been cleaned and sorted and stored. The camp cabins swept and dusted. When the cries of joy and tears of torment—all the hormones and all the baggage had gone, and fall’s first yellow leaves appeared in tree tops across the lake. That, he agreed, was a time of great possibilities.
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?”