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.
294/365 06/12/2026
That summer, she decided, was all about quitting. Quitting booze, quitting boys, quitting friends, quitting frenzy.
293/365 06/11/2026
They tell you never to argue on the Internet, but sometimes an Internet argument is the only way left to really feel alive…
292/365 06/10/2026
This is the catalogue of lasts: the last person I kissed. The last person I loved. The last time I had sex, and the last time I ate cream of mushroom soup. The last sunrise, the last sunset. The last road trip, and the last time I said, “There’s a good boy,” to a friendly dog on the street.
290/365 06/08/2026
Tokyo Bay. Low, gray sky. Sirens in the distance. The fireboats chug towards Uraga Channel, and Isumi Sato steels herself against a fear.
288/365 06/06/2026
They never tell you about the blackness. Or they do, but there’s no way to recreate it. Not on earth. The immensity of space through a small portal. It’s like the brain can’t compute. It looks nothing. A bottomless pit. And the same time looks like a flat disc, some kind of light-absorbing material glued the ship’s outer hull. It sometimes makes me dizzy.
287/365 06/05/2026
Every day we watched the ships. Every day we sat on the small dock papa had built and watched the ships move through the deep channel cut by men and machines into the channel’s bottom. They loomed, towering like buildings from the city center. Red and black. Blue and black. Yellow and black. They bristled with cargo, containers bigger than our hut stacked one atop another the length of the ship. I wondered how many huts the ship cold carry. Dozens, easily. Hundreds. Thousands? The size of them made me dizzy and I always lost count.
286/365 06/04/2026
She began to feel like her like her hands and feet were filling with concrete. It was subtle at first. A heaviness in her fingertips. Texting seemed to fatigue her. Typing became a chore.
285/365 06/03/2026
It was June 2nd when the cat began watching me through the window. A little black and white cat with a small, round head and one ear that went sideways.