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.
324/365 07/12/2026
324/365 07/12/2026
I liked getting under my neighbor’s skin. Sometimes it’d be major, like building a second fence two feet onto my side of the property line and painting it with rainbows. Other times it’d be simple, like calling the lawn guy we shared Jesus.
“He prefers hey-SOOSE,” my neighbor would say.
“I don’t speak Mexican,” I’d say. “So it’s GEE-zus.” And then I’d get to watch his cheeks get red.
322/365 07/10/2026
The monster said, “Me…Monster. You…Jane.”
I rolled my eyes and thought, Not this again…
321/365 07/09/2026
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled
The line swirled in his mind each day as he got dressed, did indeed roll the bottom of his trousers. Some pairs one turn, some pairs two. And though he did grow old, he was not yet old. Least on the inside, and still in fair shape on the outside. And this without growth hormones or T or any such extraneous measures.
320/365 07/08/2026
Mary Winthrop enjoyed the quiet things. Afternoon tea in the garden. A Sunday’s read in the stuffed chair they seemed to keep just for her at the little bakery down the street.
318/365 07/06/2026
The pitch was simple: If you’d been wronged—cheated on, harassed, fired without good cause—you could pay half up front, half on delivery, and a small group of big-hearted hackers would spend one day breaking into all your ex’s social media accounts, and another day completely rearranging their algorithms.
317/365 07/05/2026
Every family in The South has in its history an aged, dilapidated mansion. White. A long drive winding through pine or oak and past a wrought iron gate, up to the deep, shady porch. Once magnificent, the mansion now lists like a sinking steamboat, black shadow rectangles where the windows used to be and a swamp that crept up from the backside and soaked the once solid ground that holds the mansion’s foundation.
315/365 07/03/2026
Some days start better than others. Yesterday, for example: blew my nose in the bathroom, went to toss the crumpled toilet paper into the bin, and missed. When I went to pick it up, my whole sense of distance went right out the window, and I accidentally mushed my whole mouth against the toilet rim. Conked my head on the tank pretty good, too. But that toilet kiss really set the tone for my day.