 Tierney lived in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was good friends with the pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price with whom he corresponded extensively.Later in the 1970s, he lived for nearly nine years in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul), which brought him in frequent contact with horror/fantasy writers such as Carl Jacobi and Donald Wandrei.In 1972, he moved to Minneapolis to take up writing as a vocation.