Lacuna Matata!

What a wonderful phrase! -- a flash fiction piece of mine has just been (re)published by the Lacuna Journal!

It can be found here.  :)

Now you'll have to excuse me -- I have some diapers to address...

A wee bit busy... and horror poetry?

Not that I need particular excuses to have horrible, unforgivable delays between blog posts -- I'm simply awful about it -- but this time I actually have one worth sharing:

I'm a father!  Huzzah!

So yeah, that's what's been on my mind (and on my plate, though not literally, because yeech) of late.  In the meantime, and since this is October, I should note that I've had a couple of horror poems published, here and here.  So huzzah for that, too! :)

Woot..? I'll say woot!

Apparently a story I had published last year was selected as an Honorable Mention for possible inclusion in the anthology Best Horror of the Year vol. 4!

Woot!

But not published in that collection.

Woot.

It is... one of 608 Honorable Mentions...

...woot?

But!  The anthology is legit.  The story was selected in its fashion by Ellen Datlow, who says that she'd "read or skimmed...a LOT more" stories than that to whittle it down to just the... er, 608 best.  At the very least, I'll take it as an affirmation that my story isn't God-awful, which -- if you're me -- is important and high praise.

And when I think about it... being in the top 608 in anything, any category, across the US (or however wide this net was cast) for an entire year?  Is actually a pretty remarkable thing, and especially for a novice such as myself.

Also on this list?  Peter S. Beagle.  Elizabeth Bear.  Peter David.  Kelly Link.  Joyce Carol Oates.  Robert Silverberg.  Kate Wilhelm.

Oh, and Stephen King.

So, you know, when an award-winning and eminent editor like Ellen Datlow puts one of my horror stories on the same list as those of folks like Stephen King?

I think it's time to woot.

Woot!

Fiction (and Poetry) Available!

Yay! :)

With the help of a good friend (and talented fellow writer) I have put up some easy-to-find links to fiction and poetry still available on the web.  A few pieces have been published in other venues but are sadly no longer available...

Hopefully in the near future, I'll have some new things to add to those link lists... :)

Still alive!

Still writing!

For a while, I'd taken to posting reviews of other people's fiction in this space... but now I've deleted that stuff so that I can focus in on what this ought to be about: my own writing.

More to come.

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. :)

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.