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.
237/365 04/16/2026
She kept track of the men and boys by what they did after: cereal, cigarettes, sleep. Caleb, Kevin, Conroy (a mistake if there ever was one). Every boy had his own special thing. The little quirk after sex that made them an individual. During sex it mostly all the same, but she didn’t begrudge them. Mostly it was fine.
236/365 04/15/2026
A hush settled over the church, and the bride and groom stared back down the aisle toward a man neither had seen in years.
235/365 04/14/2026
Pogo do the hurdy dance. Dance, Pogo, dance! Pogo love the hurdy dance. Hands, hands. Feets, feets. Pogo remember: One, two, hurdy hurdy! One, two, purdy purdy! Pogo so purdy. Look purdy Pogo!
Turn, turn, feets, feets. Good Pogo. Pogo good!
232/365 04/11/2026
He’d call us, sometimes, when he’d been out on the rig a while. Tell us to go outside and look up at the moon.
231/365 04/10/2026
It had been ages since the virus, and most of us kids thought our grands awful odd.
230/365 04/09/2026
We rode west across the prairies until the rockies appeared like a <tktk thread tktk> on the horizon. Pa pulled the reins to slow the mules, and we all got out and felt the earth and grasses and wind. “Caleb,” Pa said, “Grab two stakes and walk with me.” He stood gazing north, his hard eyes alight with figuring.
229/365 04/08/2026
Sadie the cat wasn’t too tough. She’d bully one little patchwork thing and run him off. But all the raccoons and other cats, it took one of us standing behind her to give her courage. Once she saw the other creature begin to slink off, she’d fluff up and do a little side-ways bounce across the grass a ways, and then act all pleased with herself for giving the extra oomph to send the critter skittering.