 At around the same age (15 or 16), he was inspired to write poetry by August Derleth's fantasy verse anthology which he read several times in the Mason City Public Library.While he had been a devotee of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe before that, he was especially inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft poems in the anthology (particularly the "Fungi from Yuggoth" and also the poems by Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long and others).Tierney's first novel, "The Winds of Zarr", which combined H. P. Lovecraft (including a Lovecraft-style deity named Zathog - see List of Great Old Ones), Robert E. Howard, time travel and ancient astronauts, and is set in Egypt during the New Kingdom, was penned in 1959 when Tierney was aged 23, but did not see print until 1975.