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.
303/365 06/21/2026
Look here: these two lovebirds. Not actual birds. And only in the first fiery throws of “love” when the world’s eyes and seams seem more alive than ever, and a young man’s heart flutters in ways reserved for young women of old prone to fainting.
302/365 06/20/2026
The mother fed the son. She fed him and fed him, piling food on his plate: burger patties and vegetables. Onion rings and fries. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, toast made from sunflower bread and spread with apple jelly. Roasted chicken with crispy skin and carrots. She loved the son, piled the food high, let him have double desserts. She wanted him to love her best.
The father starved him just enough. The father stared at the son, watched him grow, decided somewhere in his hardened heart the boy would never be as tall as he. It would be an affront. Something he couldn’t stomach. And so he skimped on portions, made him no breakfast. Gave him food unseasoned and overcooked.
301/365 06/19/2026
I could go up to four days without falling apart, but only if a small selection of important things did or didn’t happen. Otherwise, it was constant.
300/365 06/18/2026
Imagine, then, President Lincoln on the days surrounding his Gettysburg address. Haggard. Feverish and pale. Enduring a weakness and fatigue…
299/365 06/17/2026
Not content with God’s creations, man decided he must re-invent the universe….
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.