1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 4

A letter from Daniel Kraus.

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Hi friends.

Today we will write 1000 words. Because what is the alternative? Do we not write? Do we never say the things we want to say? Do we never take the chance to dig into our feelings and mine our soul deeply? Do we never try to understand ourselves, express ourselves through the written word? Why would you not want to experience all that? Instead, today, we’re going to get onto that page. We will be in this universe together. We will live this version of our lives. We will write 1000 words a day, starting now.

It’s Day 4. Don’t think about it too hard. Just get up and do it.

Today’s contributing writer is multi-genre superstar and New York Times bestseller Daniel Kraus, author of twenty-six books and counting.

Here’s all the ways I’ve saved him in my phone: first as “Daniel Ragdale” because that’s where I met him, at a party for that wonderful artist’s residency outside of Chicago. He had that thousand-yard stare you sometimes see in the faces of parents on a night out away from their young children, calculating all the things they need to do for them in the morning, wishing, in a way, they were still home with them. Except with Daniel, he wasn’t thinking about any children, he was just thinking about his writing. Oh, he’s a real writer, I thought. He’s well and obsessed. (Do you know that stare too?)

A month later I re-saved him as “Daniel 🐋” because by then I had read his amazing book, Whalefall. The New York Times called it, “a crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea,” and it’s soon to be an actual movie out this fall, which he wrote, too.