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.

Gregory Turner 12/6/25 Gregory Turner 12/6/25

2025

His life had come to hold so many numbers:

Social Security
Drivers License
PIN
PIN
PIN
PIN

How many angels could dance on the head of a PIN?

Door Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Door Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Security Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Routing Number
Account Number
Credit Card Number
Funds

Sometimes, late at night or in the early morning, the numbers swirled and swirled and began a faint throbbing, just behind his eyes.

Gregory Turner 12/6/25 Gregory Turner 12/6/25

099/365 11/28/2025

The whole, vast city stretched in a crescent across the bay. In summer, the sun-sparkled water cast dazzling, pinpoint lights across the alabaster buildings. Gold minarets shone back on the water and doubled the dancing <lights>. In winter, a cold wind blew down from the hills behind the city, though the streets and alleys and out across the bay, a most curious weather that pushed forming ice out and out across the water to pile against the rimming sandbar, some ten miles off shore. The ice stacked and splintered there, shunting spires toward heaven. In the quiet night the tectonic groans echoed back across the bay as the ice pressed against itself and surged and swayed with the tide’s incessant rhythm.

Gregory Turner 12/6/25 Gregory Turner 12/6/25

098/365 11/27/2025

You open a story on Christmas—warm light twinkling, kids nestled all snug in their beds, all that stuff? Someone’s gotta die by the end. That’s the way of it. The ups and down of stories. You open a story with someone dying? Maybe a baby gets born by the end of it. Or maybe the remaining folks get to have Christmas, slightly melancholy but somewhat hopeful. The memory of their dead grandmother swirling about the room on the scents from the Christmas candle, and that warm aroma—the cinnamon and pine and maple—breathed deep while kids tear through paper is somehow a comfort and blah blah blah.