Well if you want to get to know me – you’ve came to the right page on Writings From The Grave. I am in the process of reworking the entire site to feature some of my favorite short stories that I managed to get published in recent years or been in circulation online for quite some time. If you’re coming here from some of those libel sites thinking I am some troll that hides behind a computer all day, well you’re getting a misconception of me right there. I’ve been doing this website since 1997 (been live a day prior my mother and step-father's wedding anniversary.) There are countless people would love to talk or leave malicious comments about my books saying they’re turd burgler erotica or something of that nature.
     To be honest, I don’t even touch that shit with a ten foot pole – I’ve been harassed repeatedly by shits who write the kind of crap. I don’t even consider those particular pieces “stories” or legitimate literature. Some moral rejects in the industry would post “Gay Erotica” or “Gay Sex” to my books on Amazon.com just to purposely mislead the readers. This is a common misconception when it comes to writers of Gothic Horror. Namely a pushy little bastard now based out of New York who hides behind a LiveJournal.com along with hiding behind his religion. He fancies himself a publisher, but the jagoff really lacks the traits of a professional -- doing things that are relatively childish as an adult on Amazon.com and avocates the electronic piracy of books of the people he hates. Would you want to support an author who openly supports the piracy of books? I would rather put a cigarette out between his eyes.
     The way this publisher (I use the term publisher loosely when talking of this jackhole) acts is like a typical asshole who works behind a LiveJournal, a bunch of asshole adults acting like they never really left high school -- treating the industry like it's some sort of popularity contest than actually allowing a particular writer getting the readership they have their eyes on. The Rainbow Community was never my target audience -- I don't want them for readers to begin with. I can say this much it’s usually the ones who have a site for their publishing company; using their LiveJournal to verbally jackoff on such things that shouldn’t even be in print.
     To know me is to actually hang out with me in a diner late at night, sitting at one of the tables getting a late night cup of coffee as what some of my friends and I used to do when I was 18-20 years old. One of those friends now work with robotics, but back in 1994, we used to go to church together. Even during that time I always had an interest in the dark and macabre – I always had books by Stephen King, the in high school read books by Edgar Allan Poe then when I got older I found the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I found the works of H.P. Lovecraft while listening to Metallica, and looked into their lyrics -- some people would get into the drug side of heavy metal. I got into the side where they read a lot of books.
     Some of my inspirations for settings would come from these late night visits to the diner – I would go there and down shitloads of coffee and chain smoke on Newport cigarettes to brainstorm ideas for a short story or a poem. In those early days, I used to keep a notebook (more a composition book for these kind of things.)
     I’ve been writing horror since I was a kid, so doing the scary kind of fiction comes second nature to me. Some people won’t always get what I do by not writing with erotic content, I refuse to write with any kind of sensuality because it wasn’t my style as a writer. I like to go hard and go very dark in the scare. Think what if Edgar Allan Poe was sitting in a diner late at night drinking shitloads of coffee then doing opium.
     Some people say I am from an era that’s long been dead because many of the Gothic Fiction in the underground tends to have an alternative romance angle behind it. Well my work never needed it, and if you were to sit with me in a diner late at night – you would hear some of my darkest ideas coming out in one sitting. What you’ll see with the memoir is I am telling the story how I was before I became the very notorious, but I didn’t write this for anyone who went to grade school or middle school with me. I just sincerely hope they can understand this, some got upset because of the subject matter of my stories – something I grew used to in the years I’ve been writing.
     “Why do you write horror Nick if you believe in God?” Would be one person’s question. They would give me a dirty look because they thought I would be going to a Black Mass or some kind of disturbing shit like that. I’ve written some of my most disturbing stories in my mid-twenties to late twenties and those are the ones that got me published on e-zines and print magazines overseas. But some of you who present this particular question about me and there are many ways for me to answer it.
     To answer this question, Horror is a genre I always loved from being a kid. I would remember how my mother would throw on movies like Twilight Zone: The Movie (which at the time I later learned this was some of Richard Matheson’s work) Then I saw Night Of The Comet quite a few times which was a movie my step-father had on video tape along with John Carpenter at the time he was dating my mother. I would remember watching Ripley’s Believe It…..Or Not with my mother and grandfather at night when we lived in Roselle, Illinois, and we had American Movie Classics where I saw The Omega Man (another movie that was based off Matheson’s work. These early years I was exposed to Matheson on television and old episodes of The Twilight Zone. I didn't start reading Richard Matheson until well after I started Lake Fossil Press, and was living in the apartment with two room mates -- one of the room mates was a collector of phonographs, and the other room mate you can google her, "Crazy Michelle." I started looking into his books when a person interviewing me back in 2004 compared me to both Richard Matheson and friend, author, John Paul Allen. I was just getting published by The House of Pain, Downwarden, and Temple of Dagon during this time.)
     So when I would sit in the diner late at night, writing in the paper journal – smoking and drinking coffee. I would be drawing these ideas up into scenarios that would be Gothic in nature, but nothing that would be oversensitive vampires or some other type of thing – some of you who worked with me on my publications over the years might want to see where I am coming from with the memoir.
     I don’t really write about the late night diner visits in this book but I did write stories where a diner was a meeting place within the pages of my early stories. Those stories are now lost, but the latter stories I am working on these days – I am using diners more often, some of you will be seeing one of these stories in a future magazine issue or shopping them around to a few other magazines. I’ve been submitting out since 1998, but I started submitting more seriously in 2003.
     So what you’re going to see here as far as the freebie stories will be many of the mid range stories I’ve been writing from 1997 up to 2006. The kind of stories that some would imagine me writing if I sat late at night with a paper notebook and a pencil. When I lived in Iowa, I actually used to draw on the back of place mats with three different ball point pens when sitting at the table with some friends late at night. There wasn’t much there so going to a diner late at night was an escape – even ran into the Mason City, Iowa, (KIMT) news crew on one of these nights. They were doing the news for Mason City's counterpart for Channel 2 in Chicago. The crew working there now isn't the same crew that was there around the years I was living in Mason City, Iowa.
     I would ask, “Say would you know of any dark stories around here?”
     One of them, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
     They collectively gave me a weird look like if I knew something about what happened to a friend of theirs that got kidnapped in the mid-1990s. Those are the kind of things that inspire horror stories – if Edgar Allan Poe sat in a diner and drank a lot of coffee than drowned himself in alcohol, his work would be ten times more frightening. He’d be writing a story like Spectral Exile. In other words when I lived in Iowa, don't ask me about your fucking high school football team -- I didn't care for the 75 Trombones either when I lived there. I was this odd recluse who has an interest in the macabre.
     I am taking you, the reader, back to the periods when I spent many nights in a diner and brainstorming on paper – in 1998, I didn’t have many stories online. The story I had up during that period was a short story called A Dark Place, and this is going to be revised for the newly revamped incarnation of Writings From The Grave.
     Within the time frame of 2006, I expanded my writing talents from horror to creative non-fiction. My creative nonfiction got picked up on Dark Gothic: Resurrected, but I will promote The Ethereal Gazette release of the story.
     My creative non-fiction is every bit as dark as my horror stories are. The creative non-fiction would be like the things I would talk about while sitting in a diner drinking a coffee and smoking my Newport Cigarettes about four in the morning. I am similar to one of Stephen King's characters in that sense of the word, but I don't write romance novels in any form. I write without apology, short stories -- but now I reached into the novella range in the recent years more often.
     The thing with me and non-fiction was something I did all along – some of my fictional horror stories according to Atomic Jack Magazine would read like a Gothic Nonfiction article. That’s because I cite influences of Reader’s Digest when I do write horror. Atomic Jack and I have a mutual respect for each other over the years, they called one of my stories too normal for what they were looking for – and that was the funniest damn rejection I ever got for a story. Those are the kind of rejections, I can see myself inviting the editor to the diner with me and talk shop.
     Sitting in a diner or doing an open mic somewhere is in some ways, my roots. It’s how I got started when I got my work out there whether it being poetry or short stories. I rarely do poetry anymore but I am always writing short stories. My official website, been the hub for my work as long as I’ve been online – now I felt like I abandoned the website because the whole blog trend for the longest time. Seeing some places out there for fiction being hosted, it doesn't feel the same. So doing this -- it's like coming home full circle.
     I never really fit into the Gothic Scene in Chicago either because I listen to heavy metal openly and my books are more Richard Matheson, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and some other obscure horror writer I appeared on a Table of Contents with. Over the years I also have a handful of enemies and they’ve came on as my titles or characters just to cause trouble on message boards that I try to find myself at home at. Also, in the recent years my long time friends came back into the picture – that’s because of social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com.
     Some of these longtime friends that I got back in touch with, were vital in the construction of Writings From The Grave – the late nights of reading all sorts of HTML books, he gave up on doing a website while I was monkeying around with the HTML coding and shit like that. Between the endless nights of coding at home while the parents went to Europe and sitting in the computer lab at College of DuPage, the first in carnation of my official website was born.
     I still don’t know how to write flash, but I’ve been employing the use of PDF files these current years. So if you came here to learn more about the author and webmaster – you came to the right place, but if you came here to steal my content for your little websites or weblogs just to cause trouble. Keep walking. If you’re coming here to shout to the world and magazines that I am a shit writer – I want to see you try to harass the publishers, but many of them have a respect for me because I worked with many of the writers they published in the recent years. People who say that, good chance they’re males who take it up the ass. In other words, they're a fruit (I could say the other one but I don't want to lose my host. Yeah they walk around with an Anally Inflicted Death Sentence. They're a walking abomination in the eyes of God.)
     I learned a lot about the naysayers when I was living at the apartment with the one room mate – they come and go, but your longtime friends are going to stick around. They’re the ones who are going to inspire you the most, the ones who call you quotable and show a huge respect for one’s vision of horror – and hear you while sharing the ideas over coffee late at night.
     I am an editor they want to work with or a writer sought out because I am not shy about writing a true story that’s scary too or telling that true story while sitting late at night in a diner. If those of you from way back and knew me from when I was a teenager looking at this website, you’re going to see that same Nickolaus Pacione from the era but a lot more mature. The same attitude that made me who I am, and the same attitude that gave what I did a dark edge entirely all its own. What people will find offensive about my website is this – I have a unique charm that tends to rub people the wrong way, they do call me the administer of agitation because I will go at it with murder groupies on different message boards (famously the whole group that worship Reb and Vodka.)
     When you hear the name Nickolaus Pacione whispered, there is going to be a bunch of mixed reactions and misconceptions. Some people, sadly, will believe the misconceptions before they hear it from the source – and when I say the actual source I mean the person who carries the name and been born with it all their lives. My name is either a name of respect or a name of utter hatred – the emotions of both are of extremes and this is very true among the communities that rely too much on blogs for their information.
     In the recent years I watched my profile grow as a writer and as a publisher, I did some festivals in the Chicago area and did a few night club gigs to sign books because I work with the print on demand medium to get projects out there. I wanted to do something that a gave the writers a way to get published but retain their original copyrights – giving self-published writers the first pickings of being published since they get the brunt of the fire. I explored the idea of being a publisher in 1997 but didn’t have the website or the tools to make it happen – being a publisher was a complete afterthought to me.
     Over the years that I’ve been online – I’ve butted heads with a lot of people for different reasons and I make no apologies about it either. I will say exactly what I say online how I would be talking to you offline in a diner sharing a cup of coffee – think if Edgar Allan Poe was alive in the current era and wrote horror stories sober.

© 1990 - 2010 all written and visual content

Those of you who got to read this biography, I wanted to show you exactly where I am coming from with this website -- if you're plaguing my site from the liar blogs or the cyberbully central website then you're going to not like what I am going to say here or with my magazine in terms of what I seek. I did this for the visitors coming from MySpace.com, FictionPress, FanFiction.net, Deviantart.com, and AuthorsDen.com. If you want to see the fiction -- go onto the Reading Room. The backgrounds on here are provided by Gothic Wallpapers, The House of Pain and Free Gothic Backgrounds.