Monday, October 13, 2008

Tabloid Purposes -- My Version

I’ve been sick with bronchitis the last few days and stuck in bed, bored silly. I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo next month, so to get into the "writing a lot every day" habit, I decided to play around with Nicky's latest publication, TP V.

As we all know, a title cannot be copyrighted nor can the names of characters. I've also checked, and "Tabloid Purposes" is not trademarked (if Nicky can't afford to pay his authors, he certainly can't afford to pay the U.S. Trademark and Patent offce). So I am free to use the title "Tabloid Purposes" if I wish. And I did. Check it out here

If you look at the TP V table of contents (here: http://www.lulu.com/content/4262719), you might notice some similarity to mine. The titles of my (fictional) anecdotes are plays on the titles of the stories in his anthology.

Now, be advised, I wrote this book very quickly and while dosed up on cough syrup with codiene. It's a bit uneven, and some anecdotes are only so-so, written because I needed something to include for that "story". For sheer lulz, though, I think that "Cyber:Terror:Dwarf", "XT-211" and "Death by Piratical Malfunction" are the best.

I may revisit this after NaNoWriMo, when my brain will desperately need to focus on something besides a romantic suspense novel.

For the search engines: Nickolaus A. Pacione

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Horrorgal Goes Into the File Recovery Business

Nicky's latest post on Blogger says in part, "Jaen you're way out of line with this one, and since you pissed on a dead authors grave with your act that is personal. I didn't even have a chance to get the files to fix the mistake of publishing you."

Since I am a kind and generous person, I e-mailed Nicky today with an offer to help him out:

"Nicky,

I see on your latest Blogspot entry that you "...didn't even have a chance to get the files to fix the mistake of publishing you." I assume "you" is Jane.

I happen to have PDF copies of all four TP's, bought straight from Lulu. I'd be happy to e-mail you a copy...for a price. How about $100 per issue. What do you say? It would have to be cash, though. No screwing around with
Paypal.

Jenny"
Nicky responded within about 90 minutes:

"Fuck you bitch. Just give me the master copy of Tabloid Purposes II."
and

"You're stealing my money for a project I worked hard to create. You're a bitch."
(bonus points to Nicky for using the correct form of "you're") and

"You're willing to steal my book and my money -- I would rather off you."
That last is rather close to a death threat, but...Nicky isn't really capable of hurting me. I -emailed him back:

"Nicky,

I didn't steal anything. I bought that little CD-ROM you put together and posted for sale on Lulu. It's not my fault that you didn't back-up your files. Here's a tip for the future: flash drives are inexpensive and reliable methods of backing up files. So is burning a CD.

Most places that retrieve non-backed-up data from failed hard drives can charge a couple grand or more (depending upon what caused the hard drvie to fail.) I'd say $100 per file is a bargain.

Jenny"

Nicky back to me a bit later:
"Just give me Tabloid Purposes II but you're not going to con me out of my money. Give me what I want and I will go away without a dime to your name bitch. I am not giving you a red cent for my hard earned work as an editor."
And my response:
"I'm not trying to con you. I offered you a fair deal. $100 for my time in finding TP II on my portable file storage device, loading it onto my computer and e-mailing it to you. Once again, it's your own fault for not backing up your own files. If you don't like the deal, fine."
Nicky again:

"I don't deal with industry terrorists. You'll use that money to eat your breakfast on a mirror that's racketeering lady."

I'll keep updating this post as I receive more delusions and accusations.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Storms of Armageddon --The Full Story

(All quotes used under the "fair use" provisions of U.S. copyright law.)

Once upon a time, I did a mini-review of the beginning of Nicky’s “The Storms of Armageddon”, which was posted on Authorsden. This story is also included in the Nicky’s atrocious The Writings Collected, Volume Two.

If you remember, in the beginning of the story, a news team is in Florida in an amphibious Hummer amidst the storm surge from a so-great-and-terrible-that-it-has-no-name hurricane, and they rescue a woman clinging to a palm tree. After that the plot is simple: the Hummer is buffeted by the storm; the news team finds out the woman they rescued was once cryogenically frozen; they hear of more storms occurring; and everything is horrible horrors just like a movie. The End.

But there are still some amusing lines that beg to be exposed:

“…God only knows how cold [Illinois] would get at night, night time recorded temp. were said to be -5 degrees Fahrenheit. Still livable, but they cannot go out in the cold unless they got tundra gear.”
-5 F isn’t that cold. That’s brisk Montana winter morning – and, no, you don’t need “tundra gear” to survive it. Just a good warm coat, hat, gloves, and a little common sense.

“The other person in the vehicle helped the jarhead tuck the lady in the back and slide her into a compartment which allowed the sick to rest, after they were finished tucking her in.

"Let's slide her into the compartment so she could warm up faster -- it is long enough for her."”
Brought to you straight from the Department of Redundancy. I think Nicky made a bulk purchase because this was only one example out of many.

“…I didn't get a chance to get your name earlier when we were pulling you out of the water."
"Georgina Davidson," the woman answered.
"Ah yes, the camera managed to capture that information from reading your dilated pupil….”
So he knew her name, but he asked her anyway?

“I was really sick with an illness back then and they were planning to put me in cryogenics so they could cure it … they wanted to make sure I finished college first before they put me under ice.”

Um, yeah, a terminally ill person would want to finish college before doing something that might save her life. And then she talks about being unfrozen and attending college at the same time as her kids.

She also says first that she was frozen for ten years, and then later, she says it was 20 years. In other parts of the story, she says she was frozen in 1996 and awoken in 2010, and that she was 21 when frozen and 38 now, which I think is three years after she was revived. So the cryogenic process must have addled her brain – or rather, poor Nicky’s, assuming Nicky could ever do math in the first place.

“I was fed via my veins and they eliminated waste that way too,…”

Where does he get is science? Sesame Street? Batman comics? Doctor Who? The body eliminates wastes through the kidneys, colon, and urinary tract – not the veins.

Nicky has done such a bad job with poor Georgina that I think I need to get Georgie and Todd together. They could commiserate.

“…hell hath no fury but that of a woman scorned…”

Nicky, the master of the misquote.

“Every warning of a natural disaster of this magnitude was told about, but they never listened to the advice of the elders.”

Screw the elders. I’d listen to the meteorologists.

And after that I started skimming because nothing was happening – just more rambling about the horrors of the storm. In fact, the words “horror” or “horrors” appear 55 times in the story. Could someone buy Nicky another noun?

“In 2013, they still used DSL and Dial Up to access the world wide web, but they also were getting access by just using an electrical outlet.”

Nicky (and Susan Kearney, for what it’s worth) would have failed “Wiring 101”.

“Computers shut down in the case of an actual emergency, such as the howl of the hurricane winds.”

Not the winds, mind you. Just the howl of the winds.

Oh, and the Midwest is under permafrost. And the only way to communicate with them is by instant message. Of course, if instant messaging works then so would telephones and the Internet.

*sigh*

Yep, he’s trying to throw in every bit of science he claims he’s gleaned from the Discovery Channel. However, it appears his video comprehension is as poor as his reading comprehension.

All in all, this is another story to mock from afar. Don’t spend money on it.

Coming soon: The first lines of Nicky’s stories -- which one sucks the most? Also, a discussion with Todd Hollins and Georgina Davidson.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Happy New Year

It appears that -- either in honor of the new year or because he still can't figure out how to work the Lulu web site -- Nicky has made all four issues of Tabloid Purposes available as PDF files. Thanks, Nicky, that's much cheaper and easier than buying the print copies.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Darkened Horizons Review up on Lulu

I've posted my review of Darkened Horizons Issue 3 on Lulu. It's an abbreviated version of the review because Lulu limits the number of characters one can post.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Darkened Horizons Editor's Humor

Jordan Bobe, the editor of Darkened Horizons Issue 3, has some humorous things to say in his "note" at the end of the issue. I don't think he intended them to be funny, but I couldn't resist sharing them:

"I also attribute a good deal of the problem to the greed associated with writing. Authors are people and as the prices of gas and utilities goes up, so does the need for the story writers to be paid for their contributions."
I'm confused about the message here. Greed is bad, but...it's OK for writers to want to be paid. Huh? With logic like this, I can see why Mr. Bobe might like Nicky's writing.

"Editors of other publications have become greedy with their desire to sell copies. The result of this is that they refuse to publish previously unpublished authors. … publishing firms refuse to give the new guy a chance."
I read this complaint most often from frustrated writers who have received a few too many rejections. Instead of looking at the quality of their own writing, they bitch about how no one will give "new" writers a chance. Um, no. The truth is that serious publishers are loath to give bad or weak writers a chance.

"To the critics that attempted to stifle the voice of one of my more controversial contributor’s: No respectable market would turn down a well written submission just because of a man’s reputation."
At first I thought he was talking about Nicky, then he mentioned a well-written submission.

Cross-posted to my Xanga account.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

I Have a Copy...

of Nicky's "Damnation Observes", and last night I struggled through reading it. It is just as awful as the rest of his writing. A few examples of Nicky-isms:

"Observers all of us are, or were, in our time and the madness that wanders from an illness no one can see or understand."

"She didn't have a name but her sincerity stood in the eyes of those who knew this darkness, but yet has no understanding how an illness of the mind ticks away."

"The nihilism within the eyes of those who dwell in the wide awake nightmare draws the individual who doesn't understand into a world that takes years to understand even their own sickness."

Full review to come soon.

Cross-posted to my Xanga account.