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.
214/365 03/24/2026
The Abbey at St. Martin’s was warm and good, and, if you had been standing atop the small hill to the north of the abbey on the night of December 24, 2011, you would have seen the abbey glowing with a soft warmth against the night’s snow.
213/365 03/23/2026
“Again.”
And we did it again. Whatever it was. Front-side kick, roundhouse kick, straight punch, lunge punch, musical scales, whisking matcha, mimicking bird calls, reciting “Oh, That I Should Know This Peace Within Another’s Lifetime.” Always, we did it again.
“Again.”
Sleep, wake, dream, daydream.
“Again.”
Fell trees, break boards, slip unnoticed into town and record the comings and goings of courtiers.
“Again.”
Breathe.
212/365 03/22/2026
This is the story of Cody Jones, and his slow, steady descent into madness.
210/365 03/20/2026
Was it something he’d done? Or was it somehow something he’d wished upon himself? Some kind of silent prayer whispered by his subconscious minute by minute as a call into the aether asking for continued punishment?
209/365 03/19/2026
Looking back now, I can see the damage we did. Not directly, maybe. But sometimes directly.
208/365 03/18/2026
It was messed up, how well-adjusted he was. I mean, he knew both parents and all his grandparents. Had met them and remembered them and everything.
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.