Bradley Warshauer

fiction. essays. journalism. copywriting. editing. about.

April 30, 2013
I tried a writing prompt and all I got was this one stupid sentence.

The nation is controlled by hamsters who mean business, hamsters who storm across prairies in undulating hordes of millions, moving wavelike over hills that roll gently to the horizon. 

March 22, 2013
She said, ‘Thank you,’ and he said, ‘Okay.’ He moved the car because he didn’t want her to think he was just sitting there waiting for her. He moved it to the next parking lot over and sat, waiting.
— A thing from the thing I’m working on. Don’t worry. The guy will get called on his shit.
March 7, 2013
You wonder at the idea that every horrible and wonderful human experience you’ve had has taken place in the woods.
— Some fiction I wrote.
January 31, 2013
I stepped through the rubble of my grandmother’s house. It had stood, mildewing under the seasons, for months, but then something happened and it was demolished, and nobody really knew why. I was twenty and still learning how to care. The air was cold and soupy. It made me shiver and sweat at the same time.
— Some fiction I wrote.
January 17, 2013
There’s something about the way a girl’s face looks when she’s lying in bed, big eyes closed gently and hair drifting over her forehead and a strand of it across her lips, and the sound of her breathing. For this I can lay awake for a long time in the early dawn, just after the sun’s up but before she’s awake. But Renee sleeps on her stomach, so I’ve discovered the beauty of uncovered brown shoulders against white sheets, of the way she sleeps with her hair tied up in a loose bun so that I can see the back of her naked neck.
—

Another from my thesis.

I’m only posting the snippets I like. I can’t even really read the stuff I hate.

Nobody from the outside really understands these people because they can’t express their own understanding of themselves. Their writers and their infinite supply of musicians all settle for surface metaphors. Listen to Louis Armstrong go on about sugar pines and moss-covered vines: anything about that song actually answer the question it poses? It’s easy to float around the outer edge of understanding; it’s harder to dig through the exterior into the soul of it. To understand, you have to aim for the interior, because the truth’s in the emotional composition.
— I suppose not everything in my MFA thesis sucks.
There were nights where I’d be trying to sleep and there’d be this sensation of my head expanding into this cavernous empty space, and I’m a speck floating in the dark. It makes the world seem very far away.
— From my MFA thesis, which I’m finally looking at again.
December 4, 2012
The first sentence of fiction I’ve written in quite some time.

By ten o’clock Jamie’s bare limbs were strapped to a bamboo chair and a blonde woman in a slinky dress was smirking at him because (he thought) he wasn’t strong enough to pull free. 

October 29, 2012
The writer’s ultimate goal, the description says, is to ‘develop opinion pieces to galvanize, engage and grow an audience across multiple platforms.’ In other words, your job, oh writer for a former newspaper, is to troll the shit out of people on the Internet.
— Working on a new essay on the effect the Internet is having on writing. Snippet inspired by the doubletalk of a newspaper-replacement media group job posting.
June 26, 2012
Sunlight like burning rust

washes over him and forces open eyes he’s kept shut since waking up two hours ago, when the sky was all burning white starpoints and hazy neon Milky Way. Above him it’s now purple and becoming blue, and dimming yellow Venus is still visible. Soon it’ll be hidden by the encroaching morning. Night is better, but Grant is not nocturnal.