Brownstonelit's Blog

The other day I watched the movie Julie and Julia and I got to thinking…
While I  am not Julia Child and have never been to France, I do enjoy cooking and eating French foods. Foods like… French toast, French fries and French cut green beans! Unlike Julie Powell, I don’t live in Queens. I don’t live over a pizza place , but I do share her last name, work for the government and live in a 3 story brownstone.  And like them both… I too have thoughts!!!  Thus, I have decided to blog about how I investigate and research unsolved murder cases and then write historical fiction novels about them in an attempt to lay some of their ghosts to rest.  It’s a process of fleshing out the truth from the naked bones of a case.  There was a line in that movie the other day which reminded me that you can be a writer, but until you are published… you are not an author. As far back as I can remember, that was all I ever wanted. Sounds schmaltzy doesn’t it? Slaving away for years waiting on the approval and appreciation of strangers who sit in ivory towers and read from behind designer spectacles the seeds of our souls. Those of you who live under the same umbrella of insanity know what I am talking about. It is this understanding that to write, is to breathe. As involuntary as taking in air and then giving it back… our hands take to pens like kittens to cream. We channel not only our thoughts but the unwritten verbiage of the universe and pray that the reconstruction of those thoughts becomes pleasing to the ever critical eye. And after years and years of waiting for our genre to come back into vogue… we finally decide that to err is human, but to self publish is self preservation!

Note:  T.A. Powell is a successful playwright through Heuer Publishing, LLC. and is the Artistic and Managing Director of  a theatre in North Georgia. An avid participant within the field of performing arts, T.A. Powell finds her job a natural extension of her artistic capability. Fascinated by the lure of unsolved cases, she prefers to write historical fiction pieces, finding it a more palatable format when dealing with sensitive information. Time and distance from a crime allows her characters the opportunity to separate fact from collective truth and place them both equally under the microscope of objectivity. Her process is to take the DNA of a case; what facts are known and what has been conjectured, apply the theory of Occam’s razor to each and then carefully weave a gripping tale of plausibility from the two. The goal of T.A.’s writing is not necessarily to answer all the questions surrounding these unsolved cases; but to be certain they are finally heard and works closely with researchers from C.C.IR.I. (Cold Case Investigative Research Institute) on specific projects.T. A. Powell has several other novels to her credit and is currently working on a series that will continue the storyline of her historical preservationist character, Caroline Horton. T.A.’s next novel, The Coffee Pot Conspiracy surrounds the mysterious death of an Alcohol, Tobacco and Tax agent in southern Georgia in 1966.