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.
308/365 06/26/2026
It was an alien world. The salt flats like a god’s porcelain platter set upon the earth smooth and level. Morning still, the gray pre-dawn casting a cool blue haze over the men and women waking in RVs and trailers. The first motor rumbles carrying on the air.
307/365 06/25/2026
Twice a year on cloudless days, the sun would hit the stained glass window in Widow Dunwitty’s place and reflect and cast Main Street in a riot of color.
305/365 06/23/2026
He spent three days between his couch and bed, moving from one (bed) to the other (couch) depending on whether he wanted to see the tv (movies) and nap or lay out (social media) and sleep. He didn’t leave the house, and no one called, and he decided watching movies while sick is akin to watching movies on a plane. The things that will hold your attention don’t have to be very good. In fact, in might be better if they aren’t—don’t require much investment because you’re kind of doing this other thing (flying, being sick) and don’t have the bandwidth to really focus much. Who wants to watch Barry Lyndon on a plane? No one. Except maybe some pretentious film guy (totally a guy) who decides to signal by watching Barry Lyndon. No, better to watch something like The Suicide Squad on a plane or while sick because why not? And it was important that The Suicide Squad is the one with an alien starfish, which he thought, in his delirium, was a sequel to the first Suicide Squad, but might not have been because why would anyone do anything that made a lick of sense in this world anyway?
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….