Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Poetry of T.C. Powell...?

Wow. So I don't write much poetry--and if you've read any of mine, you know why--but a few months ago I wrote a small poem and sent it away and, lo and behold, it's been published!

You can find it here.

(4-14-10, Edited to Add: the online formating of the poem seems a little... screwy, now. But it still looks nice in my Word doc, and hopefully in the print edition, for whomever out there that has a copy of it. :)

Monday, June 29, 2009

A Little Bit o' Why

Since I'm here, boasting about my (victory, say victory) near-victory in taking semi-finalist honors in Writers of the Future, I might as well set some of my thoughts down on writing.

Why this? Why write?

I won't be able to give a full answer here and now... but however much I do say, I want it to be true. No safe, pat answer--nothing about how I write because I have no choice, etc. To do this right, I'm gonna dig a bit into my feelings, and ones that I don't normally try to put into words. The result might not be particularly coherent:

I write because, when I've read stories (and not just read them, but seen/heard/experienced them)... good stories, I have been moved. Not by all of them, certainly, nor even most. But a few have gotten through to me, to my core, and I know that I'm a different person because of them.

I feel them now, and carry them with me today. I can name a few, of diverse origins: a filmed-stage production of Camelot on PBS; the text adventure (interactive fiction) Photopia by Adam Cadre; It by Stephen King; Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television); others.

Anyways, when I look back on those... works (? stories? experiences?), I recognize that I have received something special from the universe. And I find that I desperately want to give back--to take these brushes with divinity I've had, refilter them, reshape them, and then blast them into the souls of people unlike me, yet like me, too.

I want to touch as I've been touched.

And yeah, I'm babbling more than I ought to, and sounding hokey to myself. I should stop. But there it is: I've known beauty, and it demands--from inside of me--to be shared. It's as close to God as I've known.

And so that's a little bit of why. Not all of it; I'm also in it for the Huge! Money!, of course... But for the most, I simply hope that I am one day skilled enough to give as good as I've gotten, and love as much as I've been loved.

WotF Semi-Finalist! :D (Sounds Better Than "Loser")

Huzzah! A short story of mine was selected as one of the semi-finalists for the Writers of the Future contest for the 2nd quarter of 2009!

I'm thrilled to have done so well, of course, but at the same time I have to confront the fact that I'm still not ready for primetime. Not being a finalist means I'm not yet a Writer of the Future... I'm a Writer of the Future of the Future.

But this is easily a cup half-full scenario. Or a cup four-fifths-full. It's just my damned way of looking that always draws my attention to the missing fifth.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Welcome!

This is the official blog of T.C. Powell.

Appropriately enough, I am T.C. Powell -- an author of hope and promise! (Or, at least, an author who hopes to one day be successful and promises his landlord that it will happen...)

I mainly write Speculative Fiction (science fiction, fantasy and their friends), though I'm still green enough to dabble around as the mood takes me.