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.
224/365 04/03/2026
The girl was quite homely, actually. Which was odd, because you just don’t see that many homely people these days. I guess..what? They have the sense to stay home or something. But this girl, she was just out and about. As if she had every right!
221/365 03/31/2026
My husband was the first to notice the new woman. That she had the smell of death about her.
220/365 03/30/2026
Sunrise and sunset. Over and over as we marked days in the hold. The dank dark. The sunlight like a paltry meal through the cracks in slats.
219/365 03/29/2026
Bowen Means hit the ice at 77 miles per hour. Pain burst from his left hip and shot down his femur to his left knee. His right hand flapped like an empty glove at the end of his arm. The world spun, ice white and sky blue.
218/365 03/28/2026
The green felt and the cards. The cards dealt ‘round across the green felt floating like frisbees cross the table’s verdant lawn. The black grid. The circles for chips. The raised finger. The slight nod. The rhythm of it. The hymn. Hit me. Cards. Green felt. Cold drink. Nod and sip, sip and nod.
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.