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.
254/365 05/03/2026
Charlie-Bravo-30, what is your twenty?
…
I say again: Charlie-Bravo-30, what is your twenty?
…
He wished the communications equipment was shittier. That it wasn’t so crisp and clear and technologically advanced. He missed the days of static. When the slightest shift high in the heavens might lend a warble to a voice across the miles. This new stuff, every time he released the to-talk button, there was nothing but silence. Clean, clear silence so profound he didn’t know if the system was even working.
253/365 05/02/2026
The spider cares not for distance. When spinning her web, the spider simply spins. An anchor point, a line, a second anchor. Imagine the distance relative to the spider. Imagine the defeat should the spider realize the distance she must cross to anchor a single line. The cumulative steps back and forth across terrible terrain to build a trap that may or may not be successful. And even if it is—even if she snares prey in the night, the web is ruined and she must do it again the night after. And the next.
252/365 05/01/2026
God loves a good nun. Not, like, a nun who is good. Eats her vegetables and whatnot, though I’m sure God loves a good nun like that, too. I’m saying God loves a nun that is proper. IE, the right age, height, demeanor, etc. A nun who, if some child were asked to think of a nun or draw a nun, would be the typical nun that child would picture in their mind. God can’t get enough of nuns like that.
251/365 04/30/2026
Angry men forced to drive their daughter’s cars. You could see them on I-4, the 528. Hunched in dress shirts over fuzzy steering wheels, sparkly “Princess” stickers stuck to the back bumper. Rude, red faced. The conversations spooling out across the imagination. Good Christians, every one of them.
250/365 04/29/2026
“Whose fate is this?” Gertrude held up the sticky mess with two fingers as someone might lift a stinky sock from a bedroom floor. “You can’t leave fates lying around like this! Whose is it?” She gazed around accusingly.
249/365 04/28/2026
Morning, and the old man woke and moved through his small apartment, worn leather loafers scuffing along unfinished hardwood floors. He turned on three lamps: bedside, side table, kitchen table as he made his way from bed to breadbox. Two slices of cinnamon raisin bread in the toaster, leftover coffee into the microwave.
248/365 04/27/2026
Mostly when you see a ghost, you can chalk it up to a clerical error. We got a pretty complex system going on over here, on the other side, and sometimes things get missed. Someone checks a box wrong. Or the box doesn’t get checked at all. And then the soul’s gotta hang out a while, while we track down the error and get it fixed.
247/365 04/26/2026
We stood and watched as the fire blazed across the plains, the hot, dry wind and brown, brittle grasses fanning flames and marching them toward our homestead.
246/365 04/25/2026
I don’t know why all the villains always broadcast the lair. Some fortified mountaintop base bristling with defenses. Satellite in stationary orbit with one giant laser pointed at a capitol. Me? I’d buy up small real estate in some forgotten town. Do it slow. Open a vape shop and nail salon side by side, enter through the back and access a secret elevator. Keep it safe. Keep it hidden.
245/365 04/24/2026
There is sickness in these woods. A blight amongst the trees’ mottled leaves and new shoots that clamps shut the places new leaves grow.