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.
157/365 01/26/2025
The Echelon hovered up Delancy, the blue-black paint swirling lights to nebula across its fenders.
156/365 01/25/2026
It is known in history as the Second Children’s Revolution. The day youth rebelled and rose up, thrust tiny fists into the air and demanded reality back. Edna was ten that day, at twelve a martyr, and two years after that, a saint.
This is her story.
155/365 01/24/2026
You can see the whole neighborhood wake up from here. The sun comes up there, over the corner store. Ahmed’s already there two hours by the time it’s sunrise. Philly cheese all day long. Scotch tape, soda. Just don’t buy the batteries. He’s got brands in there they don’t even make anymore. If you’re a regular, he’ll warn you off. If you’re not, he does a hard sell. “Everyone needs batteries,” he says. And it’s true. But he still has them. So many.
154/365 01/23/2026
The drip, drip, drip of the faucet wasn’t enough to wake him up in the night, nor was it enough to prevent him from sleep when, tired and worn from the day, he lay his head on his pillow and shut off the small light on his bedside table. But the drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet—the sound like a faint ringing of crystal. The slow, methodical tap as some imagined someone called for attention at a party. The sound was enough to distract him from getting back to sleep those nights he woke to some unknown and unknowable fear settled in his chest. A mind that raced toward nothing. Scrolling checklists of “maybe someday” and “should get to” unspooling in his mind and insurmountable, the small details adding up day after day
153/365 01/21/2026
You can’t make the bed while you’re still in it, son. Life’s got truths, and that’s one of them.
152/365 01/20/2026
“The men,” she said, “Will tell you things.”
We children—we girls—gathered on the woven rug around Gemma’s feet. She was old. Knuckles like cypress knees and mouth wrinkled and soft as prunes. But her eyes shown bright in the evening dim and the reflected hearth fire danced across her pupils.
“But the things they will tell you are not the things you need to hear.” She leaned down close, and we held our breath. “They may be what you want to hear, but sometimes,” she said, “Most times, the men will just tell you what they want to hear themselves. The things that make them feel more like men.”
151/365 01/19/2026
Sometimes in my dreams the crowing rooster sounded like baby screams. I don’t know why. I get the panic that somewhere a baby was screaming, and then I’d wake up and curse that damn rooster.
And before you say you know about that old TV show where the guy is freaked out because the whole chicken/baby thing, I know about that, too. And I’m not stealing from it. Though I gotta say there’s probably something there. You don’t hear something and think “baby scream,” even in your dreams, without something going on in your life.
150/365 01/18/2026
Mostly it was dog we could hear in the night. Packs of ‘em moving up in the hills, howling into the night. Little scouting squads come into the camp at night, their relentless huffing as they sniffed the perimeter, pulled scents from the door and window frames. A big mutt with a heavy square head up on his hind legs and his breath fogging the glass. This would have been two years after all the lights went out all over the world.
149/365 01/17/2026
“You’d be surprised.”
We were jammed together on the cross-town bus. All us schlubs who couldn’t afford a ride share and had to deal with each other when the subway workers went on strike. I tried to ignore him, the man whose head nearly rested on my shoulder. His breath smelled like gunky floss and burnt coffee. I pressed my forehead against the pole.
“You’d be surprised,” he continued. “How easy a knife—some knives—will slide through skin. It’s like a...like a…like a elegant kayak parting the water.”
I took a deep breath, the pole’s metal and some other guy’s wet wool coat giving me smells that weren’t disgusting. I waited.