I tend to stay away from discussing illness, or thinking or reading about it. Having neared forty years of age, I’ve gotten a few hints here and there about life down the road, and I’m finally addressing the possibility of weeks, months or years without good health.

Though some years younger, author Pandora Poikilos has already taken on illness in her book Excuse Me, My Brain Has Stepped Out, and gained a sizable following at her website PandoraPoikilos.com and Peace From Pieces, her Blogger site. Two of the pieces I like most are her romantic poem “I Give You” and “Great Expectations“, advice for people who are down and out.

It’s been a pleasure to showcase and learn about this writer, and if you’d enjoy a graceful author who’s worked her way out of the chaos and frailty of the human condition, I think you won’t need to look any farther.

 

England.

It rains all the time.
Cheese, crackers and wine.
A hot cup of tea,
some honey, a bee.
Eating fish and chips,
lives a life on your hips.
Let’s go see the queen,
palace gardens open and green.
The capital’s cool,
and here’s the village fool.
So come see our land,
we’ll start up the band,
for England is sweet,
ask the countries we meet.

- from “The Amusing Musings of Thomas “Smokey” Smith

There’s a duality to Thom Smith that I like.

There’s just something so simple about Thom Smith’s poetic writing that it’s a welcome change from smothering skeins of symbols within symbols. He means what he says, and doesn’t bother illustrating the corollary.

Yet his horror writing is intense, sinister, slathered in the occult, sublime misery, and gore.

Thom is the owner and editor-in-chief at Chupacabra Magazine, a British horror site with worldwide charm. I had the pleasure of doing a Ralph McCurdles spot for his site. The site has been on hiatus while Thom has been finalizing plans to come to the US, but the site is back this month.

Thom publishes an original horror fanzine of the same name. Readers can hope to find lines like this:

Gordon still could not believe he had located the painting and managed to purchase it. It was said that Micarre mixed his oils with the blood of innocents, whom he had slaughtered in violent, esoteric practices. Rumour had it that a small forensic sample taken from the piece attested to the horrifying claims. After the exhibition at the museum was ended, Gordon figured he would place the piece in his much coveted private collection amongst some original lithographs from a first edition of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, and other great hellish creations.

He stared at the painting, into the painting, trying desperately to capture the mind of the artist, the heretic, the murderer. He was fascinated by the contours, the textures, the hues, the monochromatic tints, all red and brown, black and grey. Gordon wasn’t deterred one bit by the macabre media used; in fact, it compelled him to study the great master’s work further, beginning with Gehenna.

Seven by four feet, it hung on the contrasting plain, white wall, cordoned off by rope, and watched over by two monitored CCTV cameras; a measure which had to be taken after a religious fanatic had attempted to slash the canvas with a knife. The security guard who had wrestled the vandal to the ground later publically claimed he had been an instant too late, and the vandal had reached the painting, almost splitting the canvas
in two…

Thom can be found on Facebook at his personal page and Chupacabra Magazine, and on Twitter. And of course there is ChupacabraMag.info. From what I understand, Thom is working on some big announcements this week, so if you check out these links, you’ll be ready for the news!

Support Thomas’s poetry career with a purchase of The Amusing Musings of Thomas Smith:

Or help advance his horror career with a purchase of Chupacabra Magazine #1:

The price is listed in British pounds but Thom and PayPal will gladly accept other currencies. Thanks for reading and we’ll have more writer profiles coming soon!

I enjoy finding established writers who aren’t quite household names yet, but deserve to be. The good ones can snap you awake like an air raid siren, or put you in a trance like illegal hypnosis.

One such Charlie Nitric is a WordPress.com blogger. Sometimes he joyfully throws his words and ideas around like unexploded ordnance, but at other times he writes thoughtfully, touched like anyone else by the darker moments in life.

Charlie is a down-to-earth writer whose priority isn’t stuffing up an RSS feed, or making sure he features every obscure social sharing service from Acevim to Zoopin. As he says in his post “S.O.S. Blogger in Crisis Mode!”:

RSS feed; “wtfructose” is that? I am so frustrated with wasting time trying to figure out how and why and where and for what reasons; I’m not writing instead about 1,000 real life experiences that most people would never dream of. Most people are not programmed for these types of adventures. I do get that one.

Some are hilarious, some are scary, some are amazing, some are romantic, some are dangerous, and some are just crazy-wild! Some are not within your wildest imaginations!

I can turn a simple visit to the supermarket into an event you will never forget; a situation where you will burst out into total and uncontrollable laughter months and years later when you recall the situation. With company or flying solo, images and words and scenes flash through my mind at lightning speed. What doesn’t shine in my mind at all is technology. Not one bit. The bottom line is this: SOS – HELP WANTED!

 

When he writes, he doesn’t submit mincy entries that slavishly worship the 250-1000 word SEO limit. Instead, he sets up his prose as if he’s handing you a pitcher of beer, a plate of ribs, and setting down a page of his works, still in a 50-pound heavy old typewriter, on your lap; Charlie encourages his readers to stay a while, and stay they do. Whether you get rib-tickled by the snorts and charges of a red-blooded American bull through Manhattan, or if you tend to go for the heartstrings, it’s all here.

Visit Charlie Nitric at http://charlienitric.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/charlienitric.