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.
205/365 03/15/2026
It becomes so easy for the man living alone to revert to savagery. For example, to blow his nose on a hand towel and decide it, temporarily, the nose-blowing towel. To encrust the towel with dried snot and booger bits blown each morning for a month.
Simon Gaines thought himself above all savagery, nose-blown-towel and otherwise. We shall see he was sadly mistaken.
203/365 03/13/2026
It’s been some time since our last session. For that, I must apologize. Unforeseen circumstances, you understand. Things we could not anticipate. A family emergency. A bone-deep fatigue of unknown origin destroying out motivations to do anything but stand in our living room, stare into the middle distance, and claim family emergency so no one will ask any questions. No one wants to know the details of family emergency. It’s too much. Reminds them too easily of their own frantic family emergencies. But people will ask of bone-deep fatigue. They will want to know the cause. Worse, how it makes you feel.
202/365 03/12/2026
My brothers and I fit 10 naval mines each night into Crocus, a small fishing boat that had been our family’s livelihood in Before Times. And now it was again, the rebels paying us every morning for mines laid the night before under cover of darkness.
200/365 03/10/206
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax.Concentrate.
That ain’t my dog. The voice is hard-edged and harsh. Emphatic.
What?
That dog, there. He ain’t my dog. I got pride in my dogs, and I’m saying that one ain’t one of mine. I don’t know where he come from, neither. But he’s dumb as a bag of rocks. Don’t know how he makes it, day to day.
Your gaze travels across the brittle, brown grass to a dull-eyed mutt—brown and white—snuffling into an old work boot. The dog feels your gaze, raises up, the work boot firmly affixed to its nose.
See there? What the hell. Gambol! Get your damn nose out the boot!
The farmer, up until this point nothing more than a voice, now takes shape in your field of vision.
198/365 03/08/2026
We do things to keep ourselves from going insane. Getting too gloomy. Install huge LCD screens and play sunrise when we wake. The same screen playing sunset when we sleep, at sunrise. I know. It’s messed up. But just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean you turn into different a person. It just means you have to get creative in your life.