Apocalypse Orphan

Tim Allen is a 28-year veteran fire captain for the Peoria (Illinois) Fire Department. His writing career began the day he responded to a structure fire. Tim and a fellow firefighter were nearly cooked in the inferno, and his supervisor told him to write a report on the incident. He was so upset by the experience that he left out details and wrote a brief summary that glossed over the terror of that moment. His supervisor felt that Tim’s report wasn’t detailed enough and ordered him to write a more descriptive fire report. In the rewrite, Tim gave a highly descriptive narrative of the event. He titled it Faraday Street and included vivid details about what he had seen and felt during those two minutes of hell. His boss stated that this report contained too much detail, and it earned Tim a reprimand with the most severe punishment possible: an insubordination charge and a day off without pay. Over the next few months, word of Tim’s Farraday Street narrative got around, and the incident flared into controversy. Eventually, the report began circulating among his fellow firefighters, and when several co-workers wanted to read more of his stories, he began writing in earnest. Today, Tim devotes most of his free time to writing, while teaching courses on Hazardous Materials Response, Confined Space, Rope Rescue, and Structural Collapse to firefighters and local businesses. Tim is currently writing a murder mystery entitled Tethered, but his primary love is science fiction. He has nearly a dozen sci-fi novels in development that run the gamut from planetary colonization and aliens to time travel. He also writes horror stories based on well-documented crime reports and true stories.