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.
344/365 08/01/2026
The real extent of our dad’s decline came one day when my sister happened to be home and watched as Dad went around the house and collected the drips and drabs and coffee remainders in the cups throughout the house. He collected them al back up into the carafe that sat ever-warming on the kitchen counter. The two of us, my sister and I, wondered how many times we’d unknowingly consumed these old coffees, and each of us felt a little queasy.
342/365 07/30/2026
At 50, he began writing down the things, big and small, he thought worth remembering…
340/365 07/28/2026
Mortimer Spencer was the only brother who didn’t want to carry on his father’s legacy. Penmanship, he thought, will meet the same fate as hand loom weaving and manual type founding.
339/365 07/27/2026
It was spring when the fence fell down. The fence that ran between the side of my house and the neighbor’s back yard.
338/365 07/26/2026
We start high above the city. The campus to be precise. Turlington Hall there, and Century Tower. West north-west we find the stadium, and inside it 86,000 individuals, themselves a kind of city within the city. The steep rake of metal bleachers making a kind of solar collector, the temperature among the shrieking fans edging towards 100 degrees, though the warms October afternoon outside sits just above eighty-five, and low humidity.
337/365 07/25/2026
The alligator came out of nowhere. Which isn’t entirely true. Or, true at all, really. The alligator came out of the small waterway that flows into the Alachua Sink near the La Chua trail. I was photographing a blue heron, the stately bird standing regal and tall on a small sandbank near the shore. Gray-blue feathers caught the golden light of a setting sun. Ecru sand and the cacophonous greens of water hyacinth. I didn’t hear the tell-tale gut rumble of an alligator saying, “back off.”
336/365 07/24/2026
Tell people you’re a writer, and they’ll trip over themselves trying to give you the world…
335/365 07/23/2026
I received a call from Joseph K- on the occasion of his daughter being born.