Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 17

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Some Good Advice I Saw

Hey there, wanted to share a great article I read today from James Duncan. This one is some info he figured out by attending a writer’s conference in NYC last week.

Click here

I know I got some good ideas in this one. Especially since I’m in the midst of working through a final draft of my next novel (expected in Nov.) with my editors at Piscataway.

TOO MUCH ANTHOLOGY RELEASED FROM UNKNOWN PRESS

The TOO MUCH anthology, a collection of stories, poems, essays about that one time that excess reached a pinnacle.

I’m very proud of this anthology. Chuck Howe stepped up and did a wonderful job editing the collection for Unknown Press. The quality of submissions that came in were overwhelmingly good. It’s a damn pleasure putting together a book when the pieces included are this fun, original, bizarre, touching …

The book is available on Amazon now.

There is a reading for the anthology in NYC at Jimmy 43s on the lower east side. 6pm-9pm. Contributors will read, afterwards there will be a bar crawl. Here’s a link to the event if you’re on Facebook.

If you have any questions about the reading or the anthology please contact me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com

Also on the way from Unknown Press, Mik Everette’s memoir “Self Published Kindling: memoirs of a homeless book store owner”

Excited to share this book. It’s a fantastic piece of writing. Look for it in the coming months.

Tollbooth in the Storefont Window

Pretty neat. My wife and I were driving around NJ, cruising along the ocean and on our way to get some coffee. Stopped in Belmar to check out the Paperback Exchange bookstore because I needed something new to read. They were closed, but had a copy of my last novel Tollboothin the widow. That was very cool to see.

For such a deranged book, I’m surprise how much love it gets. I guess I’ll just have to keep getting more deranged.

The Wreck I was In

A month ago, I was in a pretty severe car crash right in front of a toll plaza. The crash eerily echoed the opening pages of my last novel Tollbooth. (You can read the first chapter here)

Here’s what happened in my real life wreck on the highway: I left work early in order to make it to a midday doctor’s appointment in NYC. I was headed highway north from New Jersey on I-95, approaching the toll plaza at Seacaucus. On the top of the toll booths there is a large sign that says: GEORGE WASHINGTON BRISGE KEEP LEFT, LINCOLN TUNNEL KEEP RIGHT.

After the tollbooth, the turnpike continues north with more exits into New Jersey, but an elderly woman in a silver car, who was lost and going the wrong direction saw the signs above the toll plaza and figured she’d be pushed into New York City with no hope of escape.

At 35 mph+, she decided her only option was to do a U-turn in front of the toll plaza. There were cones on the far left side dividing the north and south lanes coming and going from the toll plaza.

I was in the third lane over. A tractor trailer on my right side slammed on the brake and horn, began to fish tail. The woman in the silver car narrowly escaped being struck by the tractor trailer. When she was in my lane, she was completely perpendicular to me, crossing my lane like the turn pike was an intersection. I hit the brakes and veered to the right and collided unavoidably into the rear of her car. We spun out. Plastic exploding. Metal twisting.

She rolled into the cones and came to a stop. I was stuck in the middle of the turnpike cars whizzing by. The trucker was too. “WHAT THE FUCK WAS SHE THINKING?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’ve got to wait for my air brakes to recharge. I’m stuck here.”

“Well so am I,” I said. My car was fucked. Front end crushed in. Car blood everywhere. Leaking. Sputtering. Smoking.

I called the cops. The truck driver wouldn’t stay. I tried to get him to, to be a witness for the cops but he wouldn’t. He write his name on a card. CZAR it said and I couldn’t make out the last name. Or the phone number. The tractor trailer sailed off trough the toll plaza. My witness, gone.

I walked to my car, tried to drive it but it wouldn’t move. But I had to move soon. Another car almost careened into me zipping towards the toll booth. I got out of the car and grabbed onto my fender that was crushed flat onto my driver’s side tire. I bent it up. Thank god it was aluminum. My hand tore up, blood on the steering wheel as I drove.

I parked by the cones too. And began my long walk to the silver car.

The elderly woman was getting out.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m so sorry!” she said.

“Fuck it, it’s only a car. But you’re alright? You’re not hurt?”

“No. I’m okay.”

“Air bags go off?”

“Just a little.”

“Cops are on the way, you need an ambulance or anything.”

“No no. I’m okay. I’m so sorry! I needed to go south not north. I don’t know why I did that!”

We exchanged information. She said she had a daughter about my age. The woman was shaking. I asked her if she’d like to sit in my car and listen to the radio till the cops came.

“Sure.”

There was nothing good on. But we listened anyway.

When the cops came, the woman told them it was her fault 100%. Explained the panicked u-turn. The cop took her license and cut it in half. I said, “did you really have to do that? She apologized to me. Jesus.”

He bitched at me because my car was overdue for inspection. Then he told me he was going to call a tow truck for me.

“That’s four hundred dollars,” I said.

“Yup. Four hundred.”

“I’m driving off the highway.”

“No you’re not.”

“Put your lights on and drive behind me, so nobody gets banged up.”

I got in my car. To his dismay. And crossed four lanes of traffic. My car hissing and screaming and shaking.

Immediately off the turnpike, I parked in a hard ware store parking lot and called my insurance company. They had a body shop just a mile down the road.

The car is fixed now. I’ve got it back. Been driving it around for a few weeks. I’m fine. Sometimes when I drive through that toll booth though, I get a little worried.

Writing On My Iphone At The Oil Refinery

I’m at work, in the back of a pickup truck, writing to you on a Wednesday morning. I’m in an oil refinery, wearing a fireproof suit, a hard hat, work boots. This is a usual week day morning. I’m on motherfucking coffee break.

Have been doing this for a living for about ten years. I drive out of New York City in my car that I park on the street and commute over the GWB into NJ, drive about half an hour south on the turnpike.

I do a lot of my writing–short stories, poems, chapters of novels in progress–on my iphone here. I write on it almost every day, the thing sideways. At night, I edit what I write a little bit. Sometimes it amazes me that we have mini computers now that we carry around in our pockets and can write on. Gone are the days, for me, of handwriting something down and retyping it later.

Mostly, I do the bulk of my creative writing here at work, on coffee break, on lunch break, at the end of the day while I wait for the parking lot to thin out so I don’t have to sit in traffic exiting the plant.

How do you do the majority of your writing? When do you do it?

The Unknown Show Is Returning

Happy to say that the interview podcast that I host on Tuesdays at 7pm EST, is coming back on the online radio streaming airwaves on August 19th, and will continue to talk to writers, musicians and artists on a regular weekly basis.

This is good news, because I get a real kick about finding out what’s up with the current state of underground art and the people that make it.

I’m going to start a page on this site too, in order to archive all the shows as they happen weekly. Last year, I did about 30 shows and never catalogued them, this time out, I’m going to do that here, so you can follow along at home if you are interested.

Thanks for reading and thanks for the support.

Speaking of support:

I have a couple of announcements about my own writing.

1. The new novel F-250 is nearly ready to be passed off to the copy editor. I’ve been bouncing back and forth versions of the new novel with Piscataway House, the press that released last years novel Tollbooth. Things are going above and beyond what I thought they would with the book. I’m happy and excited to share it with you.

2. Some readings have been scheduled

— August 16th at An Beal Bocht in the Bronx

— September 20th at the Brooklyn Book Fair with MadHat Lit

–October 2nd at Mellow Pages Library in Brooklyn, reading with Robert Vaughan, the author of Addicts and Basements (Civil Coping Mechanisms)

— October 4th at Jimmy 43s in support of the TOO MUCH anthology that we’re publishing on Unknown Press

So many good things ahead. Excited.

3 poems

Been writing bunch of poems lately. I don’t know, somehow or other, doing the book Everything Neon with Marginalia, really got me into poetry mode. So, been into the mode of fucking around and writing a bunch of new poems, but not so much about living here in the city. Instead, been working on a collection of poems all about growing up in a residential suburban development just off a two lane highway and being excited beyond belief to go ELSEWHERE. About drifting off. About shooting off into space on a jet pack.  So, here are 3 poems …

Chipper

“so so SO terrible,” she sets the newspaper down

“what?”

“a kid died, couple blocks over,

on Mallard Ave.”

“how”

“eaten by a chipper.”

“what the hell is a chipper?”

as if it was an animal, like: look out

a chipper is loose in the development

they’re as big as a jaguar and hungrier

“a woodchipper” she says

“damn”

“he worked for the tree service”

I looked down into my shredded wheat

she folded the paper, as if

the paper was cursed

and so we went for a drive

at first pretending that maybe

we weren’t going to look at the yard

but that’s where the car wanted to go

there was no stopping it

yes, exactly true, just a few blocks over

it was a small blue house

the yard was wrapped in

yellow crime scene tape

nobody home, too much shade

no grass, all moss and lichen

a sad lawn to look at

the chipper was still out there

it said ‘Travis Tree Service’

on the side of the machine

“there’s no blood”

“thankfully”

from the car, we scanned

everything we could see:

the siding on the house, the ground,

the machine, the leaves in the tree

“the people who cleaned up the blood

did a very good job”

“paper said he got his shirt sleeve

caught and was pulled in”

“that’s how it always happens”

“it stopped halfway down, the machine,

there’s a safety … by then it was too late”

“mos def”

a green car passed by at a crawl

then a group of boys on bikes

went past and pointed, but kept pedaling

finally a cop car pulled up, and we watched

the officer get out and duck under the

yellow tape of the crime scene

he walked around the mossy yard

for a bit, just looking, staring off

then he sat on the steps and stared some more

“what do you think he’s looking for?”

“he’s probably doing what we’re doing”

she started the car, the cop didn’t even

look over, his eyes had become fixed

on something caught in the branches

of the tree

I’m not sure what.

and so be it.

Walking By the Kitchen In Just My Socks

the refrigerator door

was left open just a crack

no one notices for a thousand years

the light was off

life is as exciting

as frozen blueberries

that used to be wild.

art sucks dick

have left behind

blue petals of life force

have slept on the roof

in my mortal clothes

have been polite to

armies of magician’s doves

slipped off, high

just passing

art levels status

here’s to many more

Tuesday nights

getting plastered

but first I have to

take the garbage

out.

Sad

“Once an insect flies close enough to a light bulb, it attempts to navigate by way of the artificial light, rather than the moon. Since the light bulb radiates light on all sides, the insect simply cannot keep the light source at a constant angle, as it does with the moon.”

NEW NOVEL, F-250, Coming Fall 2014

Happy to be having Piscataway House publishing my second novel, F-250! They did such a wonderful job with my first novel, Tollbooth, and I’m thrilled to be working with them again. Here’s some info about F-250.

Casey plays guitar in a noise band about to leave New Jersey, to try and make it in Los Angeles. For now, he’s squatting in an abandonded house, working as a stone mason, driving a jacked up pickup truck. He crashes into everything, the ocean included. As a close friend Ods in his sleep, Casey falls into a three-way relationship with two college girls, June Doom and K Neon. F-250 is a novel equal parts about growing up, and being torn apart.

Details to come, including a look at the cover, official release date, and the release party in New York City. There will also be approx. 20 review copies available from the publisher. Send any inquiries to me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com.