From Nickie the Pooh's DeadJournal. (picture pixelized to protect the guilty)

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
12:40 am - my contest is live

LAKE FOSSIL FAN FICTION CONTEST

There is a contest on my site and I am giving writers a chance to be published legitimately for it as long it is based on my three Lake Fossil stories. No using Lake Fossil IV, V, etc since I will be doing those in sequels, best story in the fan fiction will be invited to be a character with their characters in a Lake Fossil story down the road. The characters they are allowed to use are the city of Chicago and the creature. The reason I am doing this is because I am curious to see who can step into my shoes as a Science Fiction writer. I got one entry so far from a contributor from the magazine -- now I am just trying to get the word out about the contest and will take snail submissions as long they are a floppy. The fee to get in is $5 and that will give you access to the other stories in the series. The email address to mail them to is lakefossil@mad.scientist.com. .Doc format please -- entry fee for fan art is $25. Send all artwork as .png format. Why I did I decided to do this contest for my site -- I noticed the bullshit one that went on last year and I want to do one that I actually sanctioned myself and what makes it more legit is that I am takign snail mail submissions too as long they are on floppy disk.

(comment on this)

**************************************************

Wonders never cease. This self-published twit who calls himself a horror writer and more recently, a sci-fi author, is having a contest for authors to get their stories published in yet another one of his anthologies. He sees this as mentoring other authors, "taking them under his wing" so to speak, and giving them the opportunity to get their work published. Thath's hith thawry, and he's thicking to it.

Granted, every last contributor writes better than this hack, and certainly doesn't need his mentoring. I actually like the work of one such author, and bought her first novel. I enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to her next one; in the meantime, we've become online friends. But I digress. The real point for this hack to be running these contests and taking submissions is so that he can merely contribute one short story, and claim that he's published a book. Heck, he's completely incapable of editing his own work, let alone anyone else's, so that part is for sure a joke.

He's handicapped by mental diseases, although he can't decide whether he's bipolar or depressive--his story changes back and forth--and claims his IQ is 76. He brags about this; no doubt he thinks 100 is a perfect score, as if it were a pop quiz in school. In any event, he can't hold a job, and is living on government disability checks, in his grandparent's basement. He's 29. Claims he had to drop out of community college because of health issues--yeah, hospitalization for a psychotic episode, and he's been in and out of the nuthouse most of his adult life. But the bottom line is that if he were serious about getting an associate's degree, he would have re-enrolled, after he got out of the psych ward.

I realize it's not kind to make fun of the mental midget, but he is so obnoxious to everybody else, and actually writes on one of his 3907 blogs in his profile that he enjoys pissing off everybody who's on his radar. They steal his blog entries (even if they merely post a link), e-pirate his online fiction which he has posted for all the world to see under creative commons, which allows others to use it as long as they credit him. We've ruined his book sales, time and time again. Obviously nobody's really doing this--it's merely that nobody will buy his crap with its lack of plot, lack of grammar, and myriad misspellings. You'd think the guy could at least use spell-check on his own work. If I copy and past even a paragraph of it into MS Word, it looks like a frickin' Christmas tree with all the red and green squigglies.

That having been said, this guy, who is the butt of jokes throughout the real horror writer's community is actually asking that people pay him an entry fee for submitting an entry, and art work costs five times the fee of a manuscript to submit? All it gets the contestant is a converted-to-.pdf format document back from The Pooh? Anyone with Office 2003 or Office XP can do the conversion from .doc format themselves. Gee, the lucky recipent of said .pdf file can also read the other contestant's stories. While there are sleazebags in the publishing world who do this sort of nonsense, it's basically not kosher among proper publishers.

My take on this is that he's having trouble paying for his nightly pizza fix with only his gub'mint dole money.

Heck, I could pay lulu.com to print up a bunch of my blog entries, bind them, hold my own book signing from a lawn chair at the end of my own driveway, and claim I'm a great author. I don't have to rent a booth at a horror convention for $300 for a day, hold a book signing there, after leaping up on the folding table screaming "Wide the thawm!" making a total fool of myself in front of hundreds of people.

Technically, by even posting a blog entry, I'm a self-published author. It's a meaningless term. There are good authors who publish their works print-on-demand, but if they want to be
legitimate about it, they will at least cough up the $25 fee to get an ISBN number for it, and get a real editor.

Why do I think this guy is such a Pooh? He's accused me in the past via emails and IMs of e-pirating his short stories and anthologies. In fact, I read a short story he posted himself on one of his blogs, and actually paid $2.95 to Lulu.com for an e-copy of one of his anthologies, before he made that option unavailable, and made it hard copy only for nearly 10 times the price. However, the guy told me to drink bleach, get "some" AIDS, and get hit by a car (the latter on the very same night I saw someone get hit by a car and killed). This is normal for The Pooh. He does it to everybody he thinks is ruining his book sales, whether or not that person is actually a writer.

Read this forum thread if you think I'm kidding. It's vastly entertaining. I know a number of people on that forum, who are also members of another forum I help moderate.