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.
354/365 08/11/2026
He fell into a cycle, waking at 2 am and unable to get back to sleep, thoughts whirling around his brain, circling the central thought: I must get back to sleep.
353/365 08/10/2026
There was something yesterday. Something in the air. A fine, cool mist that hinted at possibilities.
352/365 08/09/2026
He split his life into halves fashioned after Graham Greene’s differentiators: moments of serious literary fiction and “entertainments.”
351/365 08/08/2026
In a last-ditch effort to save their floundering marriage, the young couple bought a property, furnished it, and filled it with hidden cameras.
350/365 08/07/3036
We were in the grips of a hard February freeze when a shivering Naked Ed showed up at my door…
349/365 08/06/2026
It was clear from two seconds of talking to him that the doctor hadn’t really read my father’s chart.
348/365 08/05/2026
On drunken impulse, Agnes dragged Hyacinth into a late-night tattoo parlor—though it should be said here and now the tattoo parlor was just open late on weekends for just such occasions and did not, in fact, regard itself as specifically late-night with all the seedy connotations and knowing winks such a label would encourage. Hyacinth, who could always hold her liquor better, decided on a small caterpillar on her left ankle, a kind of metamorphosis-in-waiting for the butterfly on her right. Agnes, leader of the charge, and barely presenting sober enough for the tattoo artist to legally do her job, requested something resembling a street sign on her right shoulder blade: Man-buns need not apply.
347/365 08/04/2026
Somehow he had convinced himself he was the type of guy who should have a thing for clowns…