When I First Came Online

I tell my story how I first got on the world weird web -- I use the weird term here because I came across all the weird stories over the years. I talk about all the seedy characters I come across.

 

Hard to believe I first came on the web when I was 20 years old and still in college at College of DuPage, I was writing my short stories on a college computer lab. One of my longtime buddies transcribed one of my stories and sent it to one of his chat room friends. I had no cyberstalkers back then, but at the time I just existed by an e-mail address on hotmail.com.

The Gothic social networking website, VampireFreaks.com, was just a message board two years after I started on the web via a website that became yuku.com many years later. I didn't have the people trying to steal my company and steal my identity or create a domain that smears my good name. This was long before I had the publishing company and long before I became published for some of my written works.

The Internet was still young, but this was starting when everyone started to get the web. 1995-1997 people were just getting Internet though their phone companies or though the college they attended. E-mail was something people were just starting to get through Hotmail.com (before MSN bought them out,) Rocketmail.com (before yahoo.com bought them out,) Mailcity.com (before Lycos bought them out,) and usa.net (before they went paid.)

Websites were designed by HTML " at the time I didn't know how to write the code, but now I can do it like a pro and from scratch on notepad. People didn't have the weblog for their website as they do these days where they're too lazy to write the code for a website or didn't have the smarts to write the code for a website -- as today they use places like WordPress.com, LiveJournal.com (and all it clones,) and Blogspot.com for their blogs.

People used Angelfire, Tripod (both places at the time were competing which now both bought out by lycos and they interchange each other,) Geocities (they were bought out by yahoo and now they are nonexistent,) and there were other free web hosts that started around this time too.

I know about all of them in some form because I built a website on every single one of them at one point. I was active with the chatroom Coffee Talk and been a member of the social networking site at the time FireFly (this was the mother of all the sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, I hardly talk about this place now or days, but this is where I met my ex-fiancee. As I am writing this, I try to leave the GothicPreacher moniker behind hut now someone found me saying he remembered that moniker. I am thinking about coming back to Chat rooms and as The Preacher once again.)

This was years before I had the stalkers trying to steal everything I worked for, everything that I created from the ground up. Long before they impersonated members of my family. This was when I had my own phone line in Glendale Heights, Illinois, and when I had a computer where it was a black screen and green text. It was too ancient to use Online, so I used my parents Windows 95 to get on the web. 

I was active with Chatrooms and was active with a site called WBS (they were bought out by Disney in 1999, and they became Go Network. In 2001, they stopped offering websites. I remember when they had just one web page for each member then they expanded to unlimited web storage and unlimited bandwidth. On Angelfire, I had a site for my poetry. Tripod, I used for two sites -- a Gothic Horror website and a site for my faith.)

The mid-1990s was the start of the dot com revolution, as in everyone and their mother had a site that was a domain. I was too poor to buy a domain at the time, I was just a college kid who was just getting things online for their short stories (this was before I was doing the opus sized work that I do now. Back then I was writing stories that were 880 to 2000 words. I got attention for these kind of stories by different FireFly Venues -- my first story published was in a venue called The Gallery Of Horror.)

I was running a very dark horror website in the middle part of 1997, this was before the metal review site came Online (he started working on the site in late 1999) A site I would follow in mid-2000-2002, when he was just on tripod at the time " I picked up a CD from his band sometime early this year, and this was really the first time I was hearing of them.

It seems like most of the major websites in the Internet today started out on Tripod at some point. It was because Tripod didn't censor anyone " they allowed people to be a little R rated, but they didn't allow pornographic websites on there. I had a site on Brinkster.com but it closed because of the lack of activity. I was on sites where the main hosts held files hostage and listed my grandmother's home address on the website (I wrote about this one in my book, An Eye In Shadows. He was upset about the fact I called the website a Mickey Mouse Gothic website " when you call a site mickey mouse it means they are hard to navigate.)

One of the websites that came to me about writing a column was a Canadian Gothic website which was helmed by a guy named Vlad, and he helmed a band called Sister Sacrilege. His site and my website are the same age " we almost started at the same time. Ever since I started my website, my world of heavy metal actually fell into the world of the Gothic.  I had a lot of followers who were wearing black lipstick and black fingernail polish. My ex-fiancee started out as a reader, but when we broke up. She became one of the people that smeared my name, while my profile grew in the publishing world and the small press, she was stuck in middle of nowhere living with her cats as a spinster.

Being in an HTML type chatroom helped me learn a lot about writing HTML from scratch, when I first did my website in 1997. My best friend came over with an HTML book and a few porno films. He was trying to build a website first then when he couldn't figure it out he said “The hell with this, I am going back to watch the porno 'Mr. Excitement' this HTML stuff is Greek to me, Nick. I don't know why I picked up these books in the first place.”

I responded, “Let me see that HTML book. I am going to see if I can build a website.”

This was when I had the Weblair site on Angelfire (this was my first website before I joined Tripod.com.) I have gained a small following because of FireFly's Shadow of Darkness venue. The owner of the site, Runester, gave me the keys to the venue.  He showed me all the coding to do a website or start a webzine.

This was long before A.J. Grooms changed his sex (I told him when he did the sex change that I will be mourning a friend. I felt like I was burying a friend when he went through that. At the time he had a venue too and I am trying to remember the name of it. He couldn't believe when I got the keys to Shadow of Darkness. I turned it from a dark role playing venue to a horror venue. Some of the people from GothicVamp on FireFly were shocked at the harder edge that Shadow of Darkness got.  I introduced the harder world of Crossover Thrash into it. Some people had more in common with David Bowie. I had more in common with Billy Milano of M.O.D. in terms of my Un-PC way of seeing the world.)

I was employing the instant message program ICQ and was working as a personal assistant, one of the people I know from there I didn't realize she as going to be famous for her artwork " how she was confined to a wheelchair was a horror story in itself. Getting caught in a gang crossfire and was wide awake the entire time of having the bullet impale her neck. My job at College of DuPage I was forced to quit because I didn't enroll in the next semester at the college. I always will say I am going back, it's just a matter of when and the timing -- just a matter of the school and where I move to .

I came from an era on the web when people actually had a Guest Book and I was using one that would later be bought out by Tripod/Lycos company. I found my humble website linked up to Fright Library Toronto and one other website at the time so I didn't realize the traffic I got at the time in 1997. I knew nothing about search engines at the time so I was a little ignorant. I got a lot of angry e-mails from Christians because how dark the website was, and they were angry about how I was graphic about writing of murder.

My following at the time actually came from reading on the open mic circuit in Downers Grove and Elmhurst. I was doing open mic nights in Elmhurst, Downers Grove and Des Plaines, Illinois, I was doing Christian coffee houses in mid-1996 but they discovered my Gothic subject matter so they wanted me to read that live. So I did not knowing how they would respond. This was when Deitiphobia would sit in the coffee house, they were kind of turned off by the fact I listen to Black Sabbath. I was working a shift at Remcor which started six in the morning then goes until six at night, and when I wrote it was on paper in a composition book.

The stories that would eventually be on my website were from the manuscripts I had in 1997, some of them got lost on the way back from school to home " they were in a wallet with a bunch of other floppy disks (now I am showing my age, some of the people reading this now might just be getting Online about the age of 20. Using a social networking website for their official website.)

One of the people who noticed what I was doing as a writer was a poet at Great America Fright Fest 1996 " she was an older type dressed in black like someone from the Victorian Era. There was someone that looked like a Voodoo Priestess saying something when she looked at me too. This was when my parents took me to a rummage sale in Lake County. I located a tape version of Frontline Assembly, Gashed Senses and Crossfire.

“I see there is a lot of evil in this one,” she would say.

“There is a lot of darkness in this one,” the old poet said.

The old graveyard poet sort of inspired me in some ways when I would write the longer works of today. This would be one of the things that would inspire the construction of my website in March-May 1997. When I studied those HTML books and CD-Roms with the actual code. I wasn't familiar with the table codes that I use and abuse today. When I started my site people were pushing M. A. Brite down my throat. I told them back then, “She sucks I can do better than her on a bad day.”

A 20 year old kid actually saying that is a bold statement. In the landscape of 1996-1997, the horror genre was over ran by erotic horror and the smut merchants were overrunning the horror genre at the time. So when people saw my site the first time they were freaking because this kid living around Wheaton College was doing something darker than everyone else.

Stories like Spectral Exile or House of Spiders weren't even realities yet. This was six years before I collided with a certain musician and with a bunch of slash writing rejects who liked to get famous for stealing other people's characters. In 1996-1997, I didn't agree with the idea of two people of the same sex being together romantically and now I still don't. I am forced to keep my opinions to myself a lot of times on message boards. I will put them out in the open in this particular piece. I got the people trying to ram that opinion down my throat back then. I tried the best I can to keep it to myself because I owned a venue where people of all sexualities in the Gothic subculture came and went.

I wanted to voice my views but back then if I did people would look at me as evil.  The people who murdered a now 33 year old could easy been friends of mine in Glendale Heights, Illinois. My website was in it's second year; I was living in Mason City, Iowa, at the time of that murder. I had no access to a television set at the time so I sneaked into the laundromat up the street from where I lived. I was banned from the library because a pastor who I was designing a website for learned of my Gothic website.

1998-1999 for me was the roughest of my life. I was forced to go couch to couch, and was living on food stamps. I had a P.O. Box to handle my mail and found out I was expecting a son. I wasn't ready to be a father at twenty-two, and the money I made from working at the pet store went mostly to rent and whatever was leftover I used at the Cyber Cafe, The Gypsy Rose.

The guys of Neutral Red actually helped me out during this time by bringing me dinner from KFC, they were trying to make me feel at home in Mason City while I felt isolated because my outside communication was cut off to my family in Chicago. III used to hang with me in The Gyspy Rose when I would update my website, he was sitting right there when I would check for traffic.

My mother and stepfather would say, “You know you don't have the time to e-mail us, but we know you're alive when we see updates to your website. Just e-mail us once in a while, okay? We know you don't have a phone and things like that " but every now and then try to invest in a phone card.”

I faced poverty on the highest degree, I would use left over Subway cups to sneak refills from the Subway store and would get free pizza at closing from a place where Golden State Warriors' Dean Oliver's kid brother used to work at. I hung out there for a half hour before closing to see what they got. Sometimes I scored a whole pie and would keep that in the half-working fridge at the sleeping room apartment I kept in Iowa.

At the time I was living there, Dean Oliver, was just a basketball player at University of Iowa. In Iowa, it was a struggle to maintain my personality because they frowned upon true heavy metal and Gothic books.

This was before I connected up with a well known gothic website and other Gothic sites in the area (the website is about the same ages as mine.) I was fighting for custody of my young son, but in the process I went mad. I had a nervous breakdown and signed myself into the hospital. At the time when I was dating the one named WindDancing, her parents couldn't stand me because I actually stood up to them.

They said openly that I would never amount to anything, I guess he doesn't look around in the magazines these days. The father is somewhere up in Seattle working his miserable nine to five existence. She decided that she was going to smear everything I did because she doesn't want anyone reading what I've written unless it was the damned rainbow flag community with all the misleading tags to the books in the current age. The day I learned her mother died, was the happiest day in my life because I've seen people like them as being stuck up and living in a small town all their lives " the world I wasn't used to was that of them following their high school football team on the weekends because there was nothing else to do. I changed their world with my stabbing, they were talking about that like the day the anchorwoman was kidnapped and presumed dead. But I am getting a head of myself here, back around the time of 1997-1998 everyone was just starting to have a website in some form then there were some who were getting LiveJournals for their website.

I was conned into getting a LiveJournal, but I felt the website cheapened my writing. I was getting ready to leave LiveJournal in 2002 but I was offered the keys of another community yet again. I was just joining AuthorsDen.com and was active with the website Diary-X.

I had this feeling I was going to take off because of that journal. I didn't have a comment area for the journal like some would have with LiveJournal (I had this love/hate relationship with them. One of the stalkers hated the fact I put their name out in the open so they had all the livejournals I had shut down. I was thrown off LiveJournal in 2003 because I was fighting with Lokust, who I learned got famous in the horror community for riding the coattails of more famous authors.)

The story that got me published on The House of Pain was an entry I did on my journal a month before called Gruesome Cargo. I later learned that Wraith followed Writings From The Grave since year one and wondered when I would submit to the website " this website has a rivalry with another website that I later clashed with. When I was part of this message board, the trolls came like flies on fecal matter. One of them was part of another message board I was invited to join but they then urinated on my name because I hate M. A. Brite.

Back in 1997 I didn't really have this kind of trouble but back then someone actually hacked into my e-mail address at hotmail and wrote rape stories then sent them to every single female contact I had on the hotmail address. I learned that someone did this on Christmas Day and I still haven't figured out who did this, even my girlfriend at the time got this same message from them. The person posed as me and wrote the stories as me " they said, “This is Nickolaus Pacione, normally I would write horror stories in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft, but I sometimes write stories like these. So Merry Christmas.”

That sentence to this day burns me " doing that to a twenty-one year old kid's e-mail address. Some of them actually started stalking me on FireFly posting my physical address up in Glendale Heights " not knowing my phone line was listed in the directory. Some of the female contacts at the time were pissed off at me saying not to e-mail them again " one of them is a friend I knew from FireFly and had my website linked to her GeoCities website.

I knew her better as Elizabethia in 1997 and she became famous now as a photographer but I had no idea that she was going to take off from there. Another I knew back then was the one they called The Trenchcoat --- who would later get fame for running CrimeSpace. I adapted some of his Blow Up The World ideas to my own blog at blogspot calling them “Blow Up The World: The Pacione Take.”

In 1997 people weren't exactly ready for someone who did a very dark horror website, and some of the people now who saw my true crime story would say that is the only piece they liked of mine because it didn't show the take that I would eventually get known for. I had made a lot of enemies in 2000-2003 with the owner of Gothic -Classifieds.com then with the murder groupies on the Reb and Vodka sites. Those were the boards I got tossed off the most because I will be graphic with the violent insults and the thing I would love to do to the graves of the shooters is take a piss on them.

My insults to the people flaming on me at Gothic-Classifieds.com made me infamous because I wasn't only vulgar, I was graphically violent with the insults " I made an infamous comment in an interview on a Diary-X based site that made me very controversial. The controversy I drew was out of the wake of the Catholic Priests lusting for little boys " I made the remark about the Catholic Church trading the Word of God for the rainbow flag and putting a certain dead guy about my age on the cross in the place of Jesus Christ. During the time I was on LiveJournal.com my diary-x journal got a little bit of a following -- it became an extension of my main website because I would write out my nightmares on there.

In 2002 " Vlad of GothicUnderworld.com, came to me about writing for the website and I was in limbo for a site home at the time. So I joined the ranks of the website, this website became part of my bio on The House of Pain two years later. Back in 1997 though, the traffic I got came from FireFly, WBS and Coffee Talk (Coffee Talk and WBS allowed for people's actual homepages to be linked up. Firefly gave you a profile much like Facebook.com, VampireFreaks.com, and Myspace.com does today. They were the first social networking site " I rarely talk about FireFly today because it reminds me too much of the ex-fiancee.)

The stalkers came like flies on fecal matter because they were royally upset at the controversial dead guy about my age statement. One of the stalkers had a screen name that started with a P and now works through blogspot and the other one was known by an S (the one with a p's former room mate.)

I would pull out the thing about how two hairdressers repeatedly raped and eventually killed a young boy around the same time. These two actually took a fourteen year old boy then raped him with their genitals, a banana and other things. The boy eventually died from their repeated perverse activities, look this one up and the certain community will shut up very fast.

I was harassed by a troll by the named of sushisandwich who stolen my picture of me wearing my Iced Earth “Horror Show” shirt. The photo of me making a face like I was screaming at the crowd on digital camera. This person did a very unflattering picture of me trying to portray me as a transvestite then created a community on deadjournal called “Nickytroll” -- I used to have a journal here but a few didn't like the fact I was ripping apart a few authors in a public venue so they bitched. She became friends with an idiot named dancingdrew " who used to pick on the author I published also.

This author had a rather funny nickname for this particular person that I thought was hilarious. We started calling “dancingdrew” the name “dancing f*gg*t.” This person was active with a website that became a trolling hub everywhere so they decided to make themselves known on a community to mess with my first book's sales.

I am as open about my heterosexuality as some are with being a fudgepacker, and this bothered a lot of people so Sushisandwich would try to do slash stories between me and one of the eventual authors on an anthology I did. She would often harass a few other writers on AuthorsDen.com " she never could get the fame she did and wasted her talents on harassing me with it. One of those writers was named H. Abood. He tends to cuss out the small press and blames me for ruining his career, if anything I was trying to get him a wider readership and promoted him every chance I got because he got the talents.

One of her 'cartoons,' “Hi my name is Nickolaus Pacione. I fancy myself as a real author but I would rather be considered a jackoff artist.”

She would regularly molest my copyrighted photographs or photographs that were taken by friends of mine " she would doctor up the picture to make me look like a damn transvestite. Some people aren't allowed to have photo shop " that is something I noticed in the recent years.

What made it worst with this particular joker is she was from Downers Grove, Illinois " a troll from my home area are one of my biggest pet peeves. A naysayer from the home county, and then one from Deviantart.com from Glendale Heights who got celebrated for writing fan fiction. Then I had this one knucklehead who dated my ex-room mate that would go around calling me a “Retarded H.P. Lovecraft Rip-Off.” Years later, he would threaten to write a story slashing me and my son. He called himself Velmonturna or something along those lines.

This one actually had me e-mailing 96.7 Will Rock and they brought me into the show " that was crash and burn because I was heckled every step of the way. I kind of wonder if those two were in FireFly and tried to cause that kind of trouble " it wouldn't fly that well with the staff of FireFly. When I was online, they were still in tenth grade " so when I see people like that now, they wasted their talents. Sushisandwich could be a good cartoonist if she didn't waste her energy at smearing on someone with a mental illness.

One thing they would love to see happen to me all together is to press delete. They would say Writings From The Grave had passed its prime " then the other side of the spectrum saying, “Nick, you're one of a f*****g kind.”

That remark is the one I loved the most because it's true about me. There is no other person like me or another writer like me in the business especially since I've been at it as long as some of these other writers who started in the e-publishing business then went print. I too am one of those pioneers in that sense of the word " being that 20 year old kid writing dark horror stories without the sex but going double duty on the graphic violent content.

Some of them hate the fact I started a publishing company and the threats of hostile takeover are there but I will tell the staff of where the company resides so they do look out. Back in 1997 I attempted to get a magazine going but the technology wasn't there for it so I couldn't get the print magazine off the ground " something I wanted to do with Shadow of Darkness because I had a lot of talented writers contributing work. I was devoted to discovering new talents at the age of 20-21 years old " the magazine almost happened in that time frame but I didn't have the name for it.

When I started the magazine, its name came from my xanga blog I had at the time " which got pulled because of a fight with a naysayers for bragging about pirating one of my books. The name of the magazine came from the blog named “The Ethereal Journal” so I named the magazine “The Ethereal Gazette” which was originally going to be the name of the anthology “Tabloid Purposes.” The whole line up was involved with the planning of the anthology " everyone contributed to the idea of the cover and the name of the anthology.

We were actually looking for a publisher for the book but I opted to run it at Lulu.com because the writers retained the original copyrights. The name of the publishing company came from one of my story titles, back in 1997, I had no idea what to call the magazine or what direction I was going to take it. In 1997, I knew I wanted to do a dark speculative fiction magazine. I had no idea what kind of horror I was going to run but I knew I wasn't going to publish erotic horror. The Erotic Horror writers grew angry with me because I refused to run that kind of horror fiction, and the ones I said no the most to are the ones who write about vampires who take it up the a*s.

The Alternative Erotica writers are the ones who hated me the worst, one of them got mad because I cussed them out in rejection letter -- then the sucker created the domain from my publishing company and trying to practice a hostile takeover.

I basically said no to any form of gay fiction and this puts me at at constant odds with the rainbow community.  I am not going to compromise my Christian beliefs to run a good magazine. I learned all this time I was publishing faith based Gothic writers in the anthology. Then recently in the magazine I was doing what I did with Tabloid Purposes, but on a larger scale on the tenth issue.

One of them threatened to take over Lake Fossil Press and publish Gay Erotica and stories that slammed Conservatives because that was the open secret among the Gothic and Horror Communities. I came into the open that I am a Conservative. The Christian angle was something they knew from the beginning, but in 2000, I wrote two stories from a Neopagan angle because of my ex-fiancee was a solitary witch (Bloodletting and The Suicide Note.) My source material for those sort of stories because of the books she had in her collection -- me being the avid reader, I glanced over those books in Iowa.

This person calls himself John Smith. What he wants to do is see everything under the Nickolaus Pacione owned Lake Fossil Press die with me. Something I will not let happen especially since I just rebuilt Writings From The Grave for a new generation of horror fans. This joker calls the cyber troll blogs a wealth of information about me " when they didn't do their research. Lake Fossil Press is always going to be owned by me and I plan to run it until the day I pass away.

He wants to see Lake Fossil Press die first then see me die afterward. As the fate of Poe and Lovecraft who died penniless and scored by the community. The same person made the statement that he would cut all my long hair off and shove broken bottles up my a*s.

This person on gmail.com calls himself “savageotter10”-- he's part of a long line of cyber-stalkers who tried to make my life a living hell on the web. People like him don't have a life than to pick on people who have a mental illness " I didn't come out with Bipolar Type II until late 1999 when I came back to Illinois.

As I write this, I want people to show to see where I came from when I first came online " from being a writer with a website that published their own works to being a small press that published some of the most talented writers in the small press. When I started in 1997, I had the stalkers but none of them were like this particular jagoff -- when they are saying meet the new era of Lake Fossil Press, I am about to show the new era of Lake Fossil Press with a vengeance.

If I knew I had these many stalkers now than when I did when I first came Online, I wouldn't change my identity Online because if I did. They would win. When I came on in 1997, I didn't expect to have the stalkers close to home too in form of the LiveJournal based fan fiction “writers” B. Myers and J. Smith.

(Who both get celebrated for writing stories with characters that don't even belong to them. When I did the one story I did, it was with a friend's blessing. Their claim for fame is to slam people who do original content and made a career out of writing original content.)

When I first came online " I never had these kind of jokers doing everything and anything to make me look like a damned criminal just because I have a difference in opinion about the world. You want the horror stories about the world wide web, talk to me because I lived out some of the horror plots in real life when some of them used the mail system to harass my family " some of them as far as Finland. Then these jokers from England, he was mad because I told him where to get off at in an explicit way, when he pulls up my family's physical address and things like that.

He did it because he was offended by something I said " get over it little boy, I offend people just by being myself. That doesn't give one the reason to create a domain of someone's publishing company " and assume the identity. Saying they're not doing anything illegal " well it's illegal in the States to misrepresent a company that's been around for six years. I just happened to piss off a Trust Fund Tommy. The people that mess with me these days seem to have money " and that is something that people did when I was 20 years old too. This trust fund tommy has no idea how the law works in the United States, and harassing the mentally ill is a hate crime here.

I mentioned some about this on a facebook, and one of the contributors on the first issue of the magazine see him as being immature. He demands that I apologized to an entire community because of the way I carry myself on the world wide web. This kind of person reminded me some of the people I dealt with when I first came live om the web. Except I wasn't dealing with a demented animal molester who tried to make the Lake Fossil Press name into something it's not.

As these jokers who try to assume the name of my magazine to make it something that it's not. They go posing as my grandmother and writing “stories” such as “Gay Troll In The Basement” or the “Gerbil Incident.”

They went on stealing photos that are copyrighted by me to make them into something they're not. The original photograph they used for the “cover” is one that was taken in 2001 somewhere in Joliet.

The real picture, I was wearing a pair of Columbia hiking boots and a pair of purple Columbia gloves and a black jacket I got prior to going up to Canada. The person behind that “website” really needs to be drawn and quartered by semi trucks pulling their arms and legs in all directions. This is when my family is giving me the hang it up speech " I am not about to hang up the publishing company when all these trolls are out there doing sites with my company name and my magazine name.

They did the domain because they were upset about being thrown off lulu.com not once but twice for having that damn book up there, and they had the nerve to show up on Shocklines' message board saying that they are The Ethereal Gazette " sorry that doesn't work that way.

They demand me to apologize to everyone I offended over the years, that won't happen. They want to take over Lake Fossil Press in different ways " just so they can prove they can mess with me. The only way they can do that is to murder me and take the passwords from lulu.com.

I am not about to let someone turn Lake Fossil Press into a rainbow flag waving publishing house " none of my authors won't even stand for it either. What I started in 2004, was similar to the venture I tried to start in 1997 -1998 but my life back then was on hold because of the whole poverty line thing. When I started Lake Fossil Press, I really felt like that 20 year old kid that started Writings From The Grave many years earlier " it was the same kid but eight years older.

When I came live, there wasn't people trying to create domains of me and using them to mislead people or smear my name " perhaps that is the reason why something like this or An Eye In Shadows needed to be written. People in the recent years when they stumble across my name, it's because of the liar sites or the liar blogs that violate my copyrights.

They are saying that I should be spending money on domains instead of getting copies of my publications to other magazines, who are they to dictate what I say or do? They say they own me " they don't own a damn thing. When someone comes on with a name like “savageotter10” via gmail.com (put this name with the e-mail address and contact the joker.) Out of the blue threatens my company and my livelihood. It shows how far they would go or how far they would do to smear someone's name. Saying my publishing company is a "joke," that's a challenge on me. Sort of like how The Joker would often challenge Batman sort of thing.

When I was online in 1997, they didn't have people setting fire to books on YouTube.com or trying to pose as me in many ways.  Going into a message board using my birthday with doctored pictures portraying me as some kind of flaming f****t. Some of them forced me to put guidelines out sooner than planned because they insisted on creation profiles for the anthologies portraying them as being homoerotic; when I don't publish that sort of thing.

What made it even more disgusting is when author Elizabeth Blue added this to her profile thinking it's the true anthology. Now would you want to buy a book from her knowing she did that. I would rather see someone like her become scorned for supporting something like that. And for me to be published on the company that published her, that was the best revenge.

They got this look on their face like they couldn't believe it, some of them filed petitions to have my novella pulled but if they did that it would not be fair to the co-author. My dream of being published by a different publisher came true and that was something I dreamed since I was 19-20 years old. I was rejected from the college magazine because my material was too dark for their publication. I got the same kind of rejection in 1998 when I submitted “Wrong Side Of The Tracks” a short story that was in the horror/crime noir genre to another magazine. They told me the story was too violent for what they were looking for.

I made a lot of writer's dreams come true in 2004 when I started Lake Fossil Press, and that was the same kid who ran Shadow of Darkness in FireFly.com seven years earlier. I design my covers like I design my websites. Using HTML to do the layouts for the cover. Something I learned when I got the one program that does photo collages, I learned how to save things as .png files when it came to doing the cover because it gave a better resolution.

The cover design gig is something relatively new to me these days but it's something that I take pride in doing knowing I have the knowledge of using photo programs like PaperPort and FxFoto. Having those programs are a little more advances than working with Photoshop because anyone can do Photoshop these days. When you can write HTML into the design of the cover, that means something. It's the art of a web site designer from the old school doing the covers for the magazine or the book.

I came from when everyone created their website graphics in paint, and when people used AOL for their e-mail address. Right now I use AOL but I will borrow another computer with broadband to upload the anthologies because AOL doesn't work well with the site I publish with. I can't upload with the site while on AOL " so this is going to be until I get Netzero working (I was at least able to upload with them.)

All the world wide web horror stories revolving around me, they are because of a few liar sites that accuse me of plagiarism and act like my original written material wasn't mine so they steal my character of Nicholas Kane. One domain did a forum that did this and tried to do this with my other stories " they would create slash fan fiction off the “Spectral Exile” characters. Then a joker named J. Capote actually stole the title and created one of those stories like “Gay Troll In The Basement” using my name and my grandmother's name as characters in the story.

The other one who did this is HorrorGal with her Xanga Blog using my Todd Hollins character to bash on me " she had no liberty to do such a thing. Some of the people in the industry used to mess with me on the board where I would be the most active with using my characters as their usernames and my titles to flame on me via the board. It shows what little respect they have for the little thing called copyrights in this day and age " I wonder if these people use file sharing programs to get their Mp3s as in stealing from the bands that produce them. Some bands that have CDs out aren't exactly rich " as some writers aren't exactly rich. I am one of those where I have the fame but none of the riches.

They didn't do this back in the 1990s, because a lot of the people back then actually looked out for each other a lot more " now it seems like every man for themselves or they're more clannish meaning they have their little cliché they belonged to. “Play the game, they will treat you the same” is something that Shirley Jackson once wrote and my friend Ron H. from the Midnighters Club Message Board would use to illustrate the industry. I was just getting to know some of the players in the industry in 2000, as in I was featured on a message board's official website in 2000 with some of my work " I was getting noticed for my work on website.

Some of the names that came up from that Yahoogroup ended up becoming my correspondents " very few of them I knew in real life (this website at the time was known as egroups.com.) Some of the people I did signings with eventually became very good friends with and will work with them from time to time. The crime author I brought with me " being my senior calls me his mentor when it comes to publishing. For a much older writer to say that " it's a right of passage. I was teaching my publishers how to use new software " software I was using for my own publications on Lake Fossil Press.

(The only ones I knew in real life were The Twilight Tales guys. In 2001 I read a very short story of mine there in a strained voice, and I signed the paper and gave it to one of the organizers. I did a reading there exactly six years later on the very night I did the first one. I wish I had more time to read the piece I wrote then, but they realized they were talking to the mind behind The Ethereal Gazette.)

When some are saying, “You're not a writer” I will point them to the publications that I sold work to or had work published in " I was published almost all over the world. Twice in England, once in India and then twice in Canada. The one publisher got bullied out of the magazine business because a lot were upset that the magazine publisher ran my short story right from FictionPress " I submitted the story for an anthology.

“Nick, this story might not work for the anthology. How about a slot in the magazine?” he wrote.

That night I got his phone number from the publisher website on lulu.com. It was about eight o'clock my time when I made the call.

“Hey G.W. Let's do it,” I responded.

I have the flesh and blood of the magazine as he offered the writers the copies at cost he had two versions of the magazine there -- the versions that were a private link were our copies. I brought one of my writers with me on the bill too.  Send him the link and he got published too on the same issue. When I got picked up here I was in the transition to move to the apartment so trying to write up my biography in third person was going to be a challenge. My third person bios were out of date and the website's host at the time was no longer in operation. My website outlasted at least 10 hosts over the years. I've outlasted a lot of websites that changed hands a few times.

Everyone in the business thought I was threatening everyone on the phone or saying I would kidnap their young. That is another boogeyman story they would often make up of me just to get the publishers to drop me. There's a lot of urban legends about me on the web, and some of them go back to 1997.

Some of the publishers actually would e-mail me in private saying, “Nick, you're nothing but a professional,  but you got this ambiance to you that is very controversial. Run with it kid. You got balls. When I first heard you on the phone, I thought I was talking to Joe P from the Lethal Weapon movies. You got a fast tongue to you -- sometimes I have to figure out that because you're Italian.”

Very few publishers actually called me by my short name. I was often known as my long name in my latter life. I used my longer name for my works because it worked with the Gothic Fiction. When I come across another Nick, we would address each other by our middle names.

My first sale to a magazine was a true ghost story. So in many ways -- I am well versed in non-fiction as I am in fiction. What got me a little bit of a following on AuthorsDen was a true crime story. I decided to throw that up on Deviantart.com too. I met some of the writers on my line ups via different author sites such as Thoughtcafe.co.uk " that site folded but I am in touch with the owners, I got some of my following from that website.

I joined there about the time when I became the owner of the LiveJournal.com Goth Community. I was forced off by the pigs of LiveJournal.com for good in 2007 -- but I will say that the owners of that site still have their heads up their a*s. They're brainwashed in a world that's politically correct. They ban people who are politically incorrect on a regular basis meaning they're scared of change. I wish Stephen of Diary-X was able to bring the site back to full operation in 2006.

I lost a lot of my stories when they crashed but I got some of them on AuthorsDen and in my book. When I got the web, LiveJournal.com was barely a pipe dream by a college kid who didn't know anything about building a real website -- hard to believe that kid is a millionare now. When Diary-X closed in some ways it was a blessing for my first collection because people couldn't post every link to every story on the blog sites then leave malicious reviews of the book. Part of the memoir that originally came from the journal was an entry called “I Want To See You In Black.”

When a former classmate saw that entry, they became a troll after blocking me on facebook.com.

I actually went scary on them when they threatened to write a story of me then killing me off. Well I made that person a character and gave them a nasty death scene in a novella I am working on at the same time of writing this story. Some of them said I would die alone ... enjoy that. Yeah I heard it all before when it came to my subject matter " people would e-mail me and try to save my soul.

That site I realized had a dark side and it's full of people who like to violate copyrights on a regular basis -- that's the thing with the blogosphere. I didn't fit that kind of community because I was from the old school were people actually used their e-mail address to keep people updated on their websites and s**t like that. They were trying to be celebrities with their blogs and they had no journalistic background to their writing. What makes me sick is they expected to be celebrated for stealing copyrighted characters.

I didn't get discovered for having a LiveJournal, I was discovered for having a Diary-X journal -- my D-X journal had a cult following because of AuthorsDen.com. What the journal community needs is another site like Diary-X coming on again " Diary-X was a writers place in many ways. I used my real first name as a username like I did when I was on FireFly or WBS, I used my first name only on Tripod and Deviantart.com (the website became an avenue for my other creative outlets. Namely my photography.)

Because of place like LiveJournal.com (and all it's clones,) Blogspot.com and WordPress.com.  People forget what it's like to have a real website, e-mail address, and guestbook on the website for feedback. When you read this, forget about all the people who created fake domains smearing my name or fake domains that try to mislead people about my publishing company. Then some of these people on MySpace.com who get upset about the fact I rejected their favorite writer in a very vocal way. I caused a lot of controversy on MySpace.com for that one, they would have the rants saying “Down With The Breeder.”

Liar blogs like Rusty Nail or ExposeTheTard aren't a wealth of information about me. Especially if you know the people who knew the back stories and the people who hung out with me in real life for so many years. They can tell you what I am really like before I had Writings From The Grave or Lake Fossil Press. People will talk about me in the Gothic scene like I am some kind of evil boogeyman too, but those are the ones who don't know what it's like to run a publishing company or have deadlines they write up.

When I get screwed over, and this is something someone said of me. What they said of me is I don't forgive that crap and remember it for many years. My weblog Online is only part of the picture, and just the picture I am just letting the world see -- but when you read the newspapers articles and interviews that will show you the picture that I am showing the world and that world is going to see the truth no matter if they like it or not.

It doesn't matter how many books you sold when you read this because once you insult someone who is on the rise in some form. The words that used to burn the person will come back and burn your a*s in some form. The names I clashed with in the industry, they saw some fame in some way -- but they really don't deserve it because they use their fame to urinate on the small press or the self-published. I became an advocate for the self-published writer.

If a mass market author has a reputation for being a jackass on message boards as in they bully the mentally ill on message boards " or say the reason I wasn't on the board was because I was in the mental asylum. In truth, I didn't have the password for the said account for quite some time or when I did have it the site would go blank after I entered it. I am not going to spend a dime on their books. I would rather buy a book from a self-published author because it's going right to support their families or pay their bills. Most of the time the self-published author is far more talented than the mass market loser.

I see the underpublished, self-published, and the web-published as the ones who need more vehicles to be published in print. This is the mentality I brought with me from the years hosting Shadow of Darkness on FireFly.com (the website's been defunct for now 11 years.) The self-published authors are something I am seeing more of in the recent years and they're not paying a grand to publish their books anymore. That was something that was very recent too, something that really wasn't around since I first came on the web.

So when you read this, then you read those liar sites " you have to understand something with them. They never told the truth about me and they use those lies as truth. You're coming at this as a newbie getting to know me for the first time and you find those websites. Then you treat me like s**t I won't forget things like that and will make you a pariah among communities just by being an investigative journalist. I will use actual journalism to make people like those websites look bad because the thing they love to hate the worst is when someone tells the actual truth.

When you see a DJ in the community join a website as a goon, I am going to treat the DJ like all the goons -- as in I will verbally chokeslam them so hard that they would feel like they had their balls ripped off. I see them in the same light I see people who worship Reb and Vodka, they both equally piss me off in many ways.

When some people say “you are not a promoter,” that's because they didn't see me put something together or work behind the scenes to make it happen. The promoter side of things is still very new and I don't bother the bands for free stuff.

I actually buy the flesh and blood CD before I offer to promote them. I often work behind the scenes and often let the bands do the footwork to get their stuff played in Chicago, pointing them to the guys that does the radio play and all of that. I am a writer and a publisher first, a promoter secondary.

So when you read this, and see the message boards ask, “Who is Nickolaus Pacione?” then they would go to the liar websites for the source information " go to the liar domains trying to pass me off as some jackhole who should be blacklisted.

When some Trustfund Tommy joker wants to play games like making a domain from a publishing company that has a blue collar attitude. When they go around trying to ruin the Gothic image of Lake Fossil Press, I will be angry as hell and want to rip their heads off. The trustfund pole smoker has no idea about U.S. Law -- saying that I run a similar venture, bullshit, I had my venture first.

I experienced the dark side of the world wide web over the years, and I come across the seedy characters in the Chat rooms. They go around keeping web-blogs that create nothing but gossip about people without none of the research. Some of the people who are quite seedy and create books to make my family look bad in some form, those are the kinds who live their life on message boards and don't have websites.

Author's Note

If you came here to flame the story, welcome to the wall of shame on my blog. I had one entry already for another story I wrote on Deviantart.com. This was originally on Hellium but it got taken down for being too controversial. If you can't handle the rough language, there's the door. I had to edit some things out of this because it got too controversial. This is where I am coming from. I am not one of those Emo Topic types so get that out of your head right now. If you still believe I steal from other writers. I don't. I have a similar style to other writers, but this is entirely my own.

Reviews

[Julie McCarthy (juliesp..]

thanks for entering this wonderful almost biography of your writing life and web life very interesting, there is a dark side to the web. thanks for entering this into my competition, good luck.