Dick Powys

Dick Powys: I am now writing and publishing under this name.

I studied children's literature at my teacher training college and have always had an interest in writing. Now I have retired, I have spent time re-writing old stories and producing new ones.

Two of my novels are accessible online. One of them, the latest, is Children of the Fair Folk in  which I have imagined what it might be like for two ordinary children to be visited by two friends from The Other Folk as they are sometimes know as.
I have read of Fairy Paths in tales of Faerie legend and thought to myself 'What if........?'

The other novel is my first attempt at a full length piece. I have called it Copperas Tower after several features of England's East Coast. There was once a church tower that stood on its own, high up on a Norfolk cliff. The sea had taken its church and eventually took the tower itself.
Copperas is fossilised pieces of prehistoric trees which have turned into a metallic like substance which has a bit of a ring to it when hit. Mysteriously, if left in the open air, it begins to dissolve into a sulphurous, black acid. It used to be boiled down an processed into a variety of chemicals use for dyeing cloth or  even refining gold.
I have imagined that it might have been used as a catalyst, by alchemists, long ago, in search of transmuting base metals into gold, and thereby discovering the path to immortality. 
Alchemists, particularly in the Bohemian city  of Prague, worked in towers, for some obscure reason. So it might have been that Copperas Tower became the workshop and laboratory of a Bohemian alchemist, on the run from his native country. His secret remained until he met a young woman to whom he felt compelled to reveal his arcane and dangerous processes before he lost his grip on an unnaturally long earthly life.
Copperas Tower can now be accessed on Kindle.