This picture of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Matthew reminded me of a certain cellar dweller.
Wide the thawm!!!11eleventy!
Which “story” does this fit best? “In the Eyes of a Skull”? “Ghost in the Tornado”? Some other one that doesn’t come immediately to mind to me? Anyway, it made me laugh.
storms of armageddon where he lets lots of people drown but then saves one woman and stuffs her in a sleep sack? LOL
Or, maybe it’s the third horseman of the apocalypse, on the black horse, which, depending on the interpretation, represents either famine or oppression. La Femme Nikita has often accused people of taking food off his table, and stifling his career by not buying his dreck. We’re starving and oppressing him, dontchaknow?
that always makes me giggle. if we’re taking food off his table how come he gets FATTER with every picture or video he posts? LOL LOL LOL
Someone could start a campaign to name or rename the next storm Nicky, short name with “y” chasing.
Hurricane Nicole has formed off Bermuda. Every Nikki I’ve known was a Nicole. 😉
Nicole. That’s close.
Get this: Nicole is either supposed to merge with Matthew, or peter off into nothing. Forget the names for a moment. Merging two separate thoughts into one incoherent sentence is a hallmark of Nicky’s. So is petering off into nothing.
Storms of Armageddon or maybe Darkness from the Skies. Leviathan’s Ghost re Florida, though it’s more of his shark drivel in that one.
Mind you, Nicky’s story Encumbering is so dull and repetitive that it has a certain circular swirl to it like that skull face or storm water going down a drain. In the opening sentence alone he uses the word ‘would/would be’ a staggering five times. Encumbering rivals Insect for his worst/most hilariously incoherent start to a story:
“It would be the encumbering thoughts which would be in the sleep of the recent days, though it would never be as it would be when I would sleep”
Hmm. I haven’t read “Encumbering.” It’s probably for the best. “Insect” was the story — and I use the term loosely — that introduced me to Nicky nearly 13 years ago. Most 12 year olds have a better grip on sentence structure and plot.
Nicky’s stories seem to fall into one of three basic categories: dreams he had that aren’t scary to anyone but him, masturbatory revenge fantasies, or ghost hunting adventures. Ripped jackets and dead pigeons, anyone?
“haven’t read “Encumbering.””? My findstrg program did:
15 “encumbering”, 1 “encumber”,
103 “would”, 1 “wouldn’t”
It’s something to do with his state of mind before and during basic training with 9/11 thrown in. A characterless plotless stream of conciousness mood piece reflecting a mind lost in the woulds.
It is at Authors Den. I would recommend the ingredient list of a cat food bag instead.
I make it 18 uses of Encumbering. The story does mention ‘the storms of nuclear winter,’ so that qualifies it even more.
I’ve often wondered if Nicky has any idea how mind numbingly repetitive his writing is. Obviously a big part of the problem is his limited vocabulary but any real writer can still tell a compelling story using very simple words. Anyway, I ran a word check on a couple of Nicky’s stories to get an idea of just how impoverished and repetitive he really is. I knew the results would be bad but I didn’t expect them to be as shockingly bad as this:
In Encumbering, the same 21 words compose an incredible 50% of a 2,521 word story. The word ‘the’ is used 310 times. In 155. Would 103. Of 89. Be 72. That 62. Which 54. It 51. Mind 36. From 43. One 41. I 31. Thought/s 30. Written 30. Nightmare 29. As 23. Who 23. Out 20. Was 18. Had 18. Encumbering 18.
With Insect this pattern is identical with 21 of the same words composing 50% of the 2,105 word story. The 235. Of 104. In 86. It 75. As 68. Would 67. From 67. That 61. Be 32. Dream/s 30. Which 28. They 28. I 25. Written 23. Them 23. Are 21. Sleep 18. Become 18. Within 18. Dark 17. Described 15.
In both stories 12 of the 21 words are the same, 57%.
The similarities are amazingly predictable. For example in Encumbering the word Nightmare is used 29 times and in Insect the word Dream is used 30 times. Nicky uses the most common words such as the, of, in etc. far more often than other writers. ‘The’ for example, makes up about 4-5% of an average piece of writing. Nicky averages more than double that at nearly 12%.
But when it comes to the overuse of ‘would’ however, Nicky leaves everyone else for dead. In Insect he uses ‘would be’ 29 times and in Encumbering an unbelievable 56 times. ‘Would’ appears 170 times across both stories, which have a combined word count of just over 4,600. In contrast, I ran a check on a few horror novels written by pros with each novel averaging about 90,000 words. ‘would’ appeared on average 350 times per book. If we take the average number of ‘woulds’ in Nicky’s two stories we get 85 per story or every 2300 words. This means for every 90,000 words that Nicky writes he uses ‘would’ more than 3,300 times, or nearly 10 times as much as a real writer.
Incredible.
oops. i scanned case sensitive. missed a couple of “Encumbering”s.
That is an interesting analysis of the writing of the Hybrid of Derleth and Lovecraft, the Updated Poe, the Ravin’ Maven of the Small Press. (muff-ha-ha-ha supressiing an evil chuckle)
Pacione likes to run his writings through iwl.me (I Write Like…) and brag about the matches.
An even more incredible stat is that just five words (the, of, in, it, as) compose more than a quarter of the overall word count of Insect, while it’s a mere four words (the, in, would, of) for Encumbering.
That’s an interesting analysis (or, it’s interesting to those of us who are writery geeks anyway). Nicky has what I like to sometimes call a lot of “fluff” going on in his work. Basically, it’s when a writer discards Occam’s Razor and does a twisty-turny path toward what they’re trying to say instead of simplifying the sentence and just stating the thought and moving on to the next. Some of my clients whom I edit for do it, especially the newer writers, but nowhere near that level of Pacionese (thank god). I wouldn’t edit him even if he could pay me.
Writery geeks of the world unite! 🙂 Nicky’s ‘work’ is pretty much all fluff. Not only does he repeat himself endlessly but he is incapable of writing a direct sentence. He never just writes ‘It was a hot day,’ it’s always something like ‘It would be in the heat of the days that would warm in the sunlit hours of blah.’ I’ve never seen anything like it. Even five year olds can write more directly than Nicky. In his own ridiculous way he is a unique writer.
I have a theory that Nicky’s excessive meandering, repetition, and chronic overuse of ‘would/would be’ in his fiction is a subconscious reflection of his utter inability to take action in real life. He’s far too narcissistic to admit this to himself of course, so blames others for his failures instead. He ‘would be’ a successful writer if only other writers weren’t sabotaging his career. He ‘would’ get a band together if only he wasn’t stuck in the middle of nowhere. He ‘would’ move out of his dead grandma’s basement and get a life if only he could save the required money, but he can’t because his monthly DSSI check isn’t even enough to cover the bills. And maybe he ‘would be’ able to write concise and direct sentences by now if he hadn’t spent the last twenty years trying to justify being a lazy slob who can’t be bothered to improve himself.
He’s also trying to emulate his hero, Lovecraft. I’ve read some Lovecraft, mostly his novella stuff, but I could never get very deep into his work for exactly the reasons stated above. He uses ten words when five would have sufficed. I know it’s his “style,” and I think if I’d discovered him back in my teens, I would have had a lot more patience for his writing, but you get old and codgery and short on patience after a point. I kind of wish Nicky had idolized Hemingway, instead.
Bingo!
He mimicks the form of Lovecraft’s style badly without catching the substance of Lovecraft’s vision of cosmic horror.
It is my understanding that the Pacione stories published by others (his “print exclusives”) had to be heavily edited and at least one editor threw up their hands and prefaced his space-filler with an apologetic note to the readers.
that was Withersin. I believe they folded not long after. Not the only magazine to fold soon after printing a Nicki story.
“The Haunting of Apt #2W”, in Withersin Jan 2008 (v1 i1) Birth Issue?
‘Lost in the Woulds.’ What a great title for an unauthorized biography of Nickynoodle 🙂 Is Stinky Cat actually writing his bio or does she just say that to wind him up? Someone really should write a tell-all on that nut one of these days. That ‘would’ drive him berserk, especially since he’d never see a dime from it.
I should wait for Stinky Cat to respond, but I suspect he accused her of being his biographer and she played along with it.
I was messing with him but I have toyed with the idea of a comic book of the life story of Ricky Macione by StinkyCat. I’ll probably start with him being birthed in the front yard and falling on his head.