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.
298/365 06/16/2026
Glen Fortune was a stuntman, just like his father, and his father before him.
297/365 06/15/2026
There were a thousand reasons the heist wouldn’t work, and we’d considered nearly all of them.
296/365 06/14/2026
Marston
“Let us consider a moment, then, the subversive spelling of ‘Tasty’ in the delightful lyrical romp that is ‘Fergalicious’ by Fergie, formerly of the Black Eyed Peas, and did you know?” The professor stopped to chuckle to himself, letting his laser pointer roll across his palm as if it were dice. “Also of the girl group Wild Orchid, which had changed its name from NRG, another quite novel spelling if I do say so myself.” He chuckled again.
I swear I wanted to die.
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.