Hello and Welcome!

Hey-ho and what-do-ya-know!

I see you've found your way here to my Home Base, my Head-Quarters, my Secret Lair, my Sanctum Santorum!  Which means that you must have found the clues, solved the riddles, and followed the trail less traveled; in short, you answered the Call To Adventure!

Yes, I know, right now you're saying "What is this idiot talking about?  All I did was click a link!"

And that link led you straight here, to The Adventure Site, the official online HQ of neo-pulp adventure fictioneer:  Timothy A. Sayell!  (cue kazoo fanfare)

What does all that mean?  The short version is that I'm an author.  What do I write?  Well, I write adventure stories in various genres.  I write Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, High Fantasy, Space Opera, Pulp Hero, and a few weird cross-genre things that are a little harder to classify.

Yeah, but have you actually been published?  Sure I have!  I've had stories appear in webzines like Raygun Revival, Flashing Swords, and Abandoned Towers.  Some of my stories appeared in Big Pulp Magazine, and a few anthologies.  Sadly, these ezines are now defunct, but the physical magazines and anthologies are still available at Amazon and a few other places online.

So I bet you're wondering what sorts of things influence my writing.  And even if you're not, I'll tell ya anyway!  Well, to start with, there are the normal things from TV and Movies:  Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,  Conan the Barbarian, Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian and various works by George Pal, Roger Corman, and films derived from the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.   These somehow lead me backwards to the old Saturday afternoon chapter serials that used to accompany a movie and a cartoon at the local theater back in, like, the 1940's.  I'm talking things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Phantom Empire, Undersea Kingdom, and King of the Rocketmen!

But those are movies, you're supposed to be a writer!  What are your literary influences?!  My list starts off sounding like most other genre writers, I suspect.  Because it starts off with J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner.  I learned that most of these folks first published their stories in old Pulp Magazines, and I started learning about and collecting stories from other great authors from the Pulps.  Folks like Norvell Page, Lester Dent, Emile Tepperman, Wayne Rogers, and many, many others.

So, how did you get into writing?  I think I'll place a lot of blame and credit on role-playing games.  In my opinion, a role-playing game is sort of like a group storytelling session.  Each player controls the actions of one character in the story, the game master tells us what happens in the story as the result of the various players' actions.  I was fascinated with the prospect of Dungeons and Dragons, but for a long time I had no one willing to play it with me.  So, I studied it, made up my own situations, and eventually started to write them down.  I learned of other games, like Gamma World and Star Frontiers, but I had never even seen physical copies of these games.

Of course, I eventually did play Dungeons and Dragon...a LOT.  And it did inspire some of the stories I've written, and some I'm still working on.  Other games have sparked other ideas, and so have pulp magazines, old radio shows, and movies.

So I write the kind of stuff I like.  And what I like is fun escapist adventure!  Sometimes that means storming the castle, sometimes it means trekking across the ruined city of a post-apocalyptic earth.  Sometimes it means seeking a lost treasure in a hidden temple in the jungle, or following a masked vigilante as he tracks down the mad bomber that wants to level the city, or even zooming my starfighter past planets to engage in the epic space battle!

That's Amazing Stuff!

Ya think so?  Well so do I!  What are we waiting for?  Let's assemble the expedition, and get this safari started!  If you're after adventure, excitement, and pure pulp fun join me on the journey and together we'll answer the Call To Adventure!

Yours Truly,
Timothy A. Sayell