My Bio

Casey Cooper

As the son of a jazz musician turned high school, college prep, English teacher, I grew up exposed to more jazz in my daily life than most, and I suspect, with more corrections to my grammar as well.

My father much preferred to listen to music than to watch TV. He had a wonderful collection of albums to which I was exposed.
I grew up listening to the giants of jazz like Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, the Dorsey Brothers, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, and many more.
To my father, swing jazz was music, and except for the works of the classical masters, everything else was “Hillbilly Junk”. In his eyes (ears?), there was no difference between Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix.

 Naturally, I grew up to be a fan of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Blues. To be fair, he bought me my first bass and would occasionally drop in to listen to the sessions of my high school garage band. He always had a pained expression on his face, however, when he did so.
 I wrote my first song back then, the first of many. I didn’t even play the guitar at that point, just the bass. When I learned acoustic six-string guitar, it opened the floodgates, and starting in the early 70s; I wrote many songs. Some of which I still play to this day.

When I retired from my day job early in 2020 (right before Covid, I might add), I decided to compose a concept album of a Fantasy story using songs I had written over the course of many years. Some were decades old, and I wrote others just for the project.
I had assembled a home recording studio and at that time I felt that my retired life was to be time spent making music. When I had finished with this—what was to be the first of many projects—I spent some time just listening and felt the itch to write the book that the recording outlined. I recorded half a dozen songs for the next album, but something just kept gnawing at me. The need to write the novel that went with that fantasy album.

I began looking for a way to accomplish this. I bought a couple of books on craft. I started looking online for a class. Something that would get me started to write this book. While exploring my online options, I was fortunate enough to discover Gabriela Pereira and her diyMFA program. After completing several programs there, I was invited to write a few articles under the diyMFA banner. Five were published, and they are available on my thoughts page.
After my classes with diyMFA I joined the Mary Adkins Book Incubator Community and finally finished my first draft of my first novel. (Thank you, Mary, Liz, Harrison, Ashely, Emma, Gayle, and Lucas!)

When I was in the fifth grade, I used to bug my father to take me to the drive-in (remember those?), so I could watch things like The Angry Red Planet, It Came From Beneath The Sea, and other movies of that nature. He took a friend of mine and me to a couple of these, but they must have bored him stiff because one day, he presented me with a paperback book, one, in fact, I still have to this day. It was Star Gate by Andre Norton, and it was my first introduction to Sci-Fi.

I was enchanted. I remember thinking, “I could write stories like this!”. It only took me about sixty years to actually sit down and start, but now I am.

I have been seen reading all kinds of things, from fairytales to super-string theory.

I hold guest citizenship in The Forgotten Realms, Oz, Pellucidar, and on the Discworld.

I am a member of the South Carolina Writers Association.

I live alone with my two trusty cats. Liv, a lavender tortoiseshell, and Simon, an orange tiger.

You can follow me on Facebook.