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.
314/365 07/02/2026
The kingdom of Errant harnessed the wind. Caught her, captured her. Turned her into a beast of burden. The technologies they made were wondrous. Towering buildings of gleaming marble. Water pumped from lakes and seas over miles for baths, drinking, elegant fountains in city squares.
313/365 07/01/2026
She was a little dog what thought she was a big one. Conversely, he was a big dog what thought he was little.
312/365 06/30/2026
The young couple relished in showing others what they couldn’t have. The man tall, broad and tan. The woman lithe and willowy.
310/365 06/28/2026
The Dragon Mother slept atop the earth. Her cave was miles deep. Her fiery furnace heart kept it warm. Outside on the surface, the polar ice and snow swirled and raged with storming winds. Inside, the Dragon Mother breathed deep and shifted; smoke swirls rose from her nostrils.
309/365 06/27/2026
Before he lost his hand in the thresher, Malcom Blatt was known among the women of Ulysses for his delicate, ladylike fingers.
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?