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.
331/365 07/19/2026
Mick Jones opened his dresser one morning and, instead of finding socks and underwear or T-shirts, he found each drawer had been filled to the brim with the black vacuum of space.
329/365 07/17/2026
“Dwarf, Elf, Ninja, Pirate.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dwarf, Elf, Ninja, Pirate. It’s like a graph. And you can plot yourself on it. Like the kind of person you are.”
328/365 07/16/2026
The assassin fired three shots from high atop One Blackfriars, all intended for the Prime Minister, who was giving a dedication speech in the Tate Modern’s Garden.
327/365 07/15/2026
When he woke the next morning, he barely recognized himself in the mirror. Red eyes swollen nearly shut. Flushed skin pressed tight from the inside like the booze had slightly inflated him.
325/365 07/13/2026
What he knew: he’d developed a consistent, nagging cough. What he didn’t know: the cough represented a second self, begging to be free.