Jay S Bell

Jay S. Bell wears the secret identity of a Typical Boring Suburban Man by day, then transforms to a keyboard punching wordsmith by night. Born and raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas against a Forrest Gump backdrop of the Vietnam War, the moon landings, Watergate, hippies, and the JFK assassination. Bell describes himself as an abysmal student who abhorred reading until his father, in desperation, turned to the classics—
Conan the Barbarian.

“I tore through pulp fiction with an addiction bordering on insanity. Mickey Spillane, Louis L’Amour, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs…the list is exhaustive,” says Bell. “I would walk a mile, uphill through the Texas heat, to the library and bookstore in downtown Garland, and carry back, uphill through the Texas heat, a
stack of books from my armpit to my fingertips.”

To say that fiction became a central focus in Bell’s life would be an understatement, though his taste ran hard toward creators like John D. MacDonald, Robert Heinlein, and Donald Hamilton, opting for Have Spacesuit, Will Travel over “The Classics” which left him bored to
tears during his formative years.

Fast forward to an early career in retail loss prevention, marriage, and firstborn son, Bell wrote his first, as he describes “horrible, no good,
very bad” novel with his infant son sitting on his lap. He bravely showed it to a few folks, which encouraged him to stick to his day job. Which was fine by him because kid #2 came along and food needed to be put on the table.

Twenty years passed. The kids grew up. Career changes happened. Bell moved from crime fighting to sales. Somewhere in there, his urge to write returned. In 2011, he got serious about it, joining writer groups and receiving feedback via online forums. “I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I loved it.”

Bell currently resides less than thirty miles from where he was born. He is a cancer survivor who worked his way up through two long and fulfilling careers, raised two kids to adulthood, has owned and been owned by many cats, and has been married to his lovely wife for over thirty years. “I’ll keep writing until saner people take my keyboard away and wheel me out to sit on the porch...where I will have a book cracked open on my lap.”