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.
217/365 03/27/2026
He died up amongst the rigging. Captain’s boy and lover. Sent scampering to the only high ground on he sea: the masts. Up and up and up he climbed on sleet-slick rigging to the crow’s nest and peered out into the dark. But for naught. There was no light, no lightning. Nothing but inky black and the icy squall and the ship’s pitch and roll and unsure footing. A small yelp and grasp and nothing.
216/365 03/26/2026
The clock tick sounded time’s inexorable march as the family sat in the warm, dim, chintzy room and stared, each of them—mother, father, grandfather, boy of 12, girl of 8—into a vague middle distance not in the room but somewhere outside of self, each wrestling a question that ranged from “How can life go on when life’s very engine—the very thing that kept it going and moving forward—is suddenly gone?” to “Why isn’t anyone talking?”
215/365 03/25/2026
It was decades spent in the not-knowing, slogging through a life as if through dark, wet, heated jungle. The dulling vines and grabbing undergrowth slowing progress, and never being able to see more than a few foggy feet in front of our faces. Machetes of our wit and intellect hacking, slashing through a life over-tangled when all the time a clear path not 10 meters to the east, if only we had known.
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.