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.
227/365 04/06/2026
There were four of us that year, and we all drove out to the desert. We wanted the wide-open space of it. The heat and dry. The beautiful, punishing landscape.
226/365 04/05/2026
To live in pain is to live partially inside yourself, always. To mask and smile and say, “Fine, thank you,” while a piece of you works to inventory each sensation. The dull throb like a too-big heart beating in your hip. The threat of a hot, sharp stab if you move a certain way. The way your leg might feel for a brief moment, detached and floating away from your body, the absence of sensation signaling the arrival of a new sensation where bone grinds bone, which clamps your teeth together and sends a sickening scrape through your very center.
There is nothing like pain to make you aware of yourself in space, as a body, both inside and out.
225/365 04/04/2026
Every morning he woke up with a gasp for breath, t-shirt collar soaked in cold sweat and his heart racing, a rushing in his ears. 3:38 in rude, red digits on the clock radio. The same time, like some sick clockwork.
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.