ATA-7 Casey Cooper

This is Author to Author. I'm Tim Trott, and this channel is about authors for authors. As a writer, I like to discover how other authors find their inspiration and motivation. Casey Cooper grew up with a pretty unique soundtrack. His dad was a jazz musician who later became a high school English teacher. That meant he heard a lot of jazz around the house, and he got plenty of grammar lessons too. His first brush with science fiction came when he picked up Stargate by Andre Norton, and he was hooked. After retiring from his day job in early 2020, Casey started putting together a concept album using fantasy stories inspired by songs he'd written over the years. Once he recorded it, he felt the itch to write a novel to go with it, and that is how the Glory Road series was born. He also is a proud member of the South Carolina Writers Association. In a moment, we'll meet our guest author. Author to Author is supported by Cybershoot.com, the right host for your author website. This is where I normally tell you about Cybershoot hosting for authors, but this time I'm going to talk about Wordfence. Wordfence is a WordPress plugin that provides a number of security functions you need for your author website. A firewall protects your site from common attacks like malicious file uploads. A malware scanner protects against malicious code in themes, plugins, and core files. Wordfence provides login security and reports all admin logins by IP address, and it can block specific IPs and countries. Wordfence provides live site traffic monitoring. It can repair and restore any corrupted or infected WordPress core files, and it provides email notifications about critical issues. And that's just what Wordfence does in a free plan. Every WordPress website hosted by Cybershoot.com comes with WordPress installed. That's what we do for you when you host your author website with us, but even if your website is hosted somewhere else, you should install Wordfence. Log into admin and go to Plugins, Add New, and search for Wordfence. Or you can move your WordPress site to cybershoot.com and we'll do it for you. Cybershoot.com, the place for author websites. First of all, Casey Cooper, we need to explain the term "well met." Gladly.

As a longtime player of Dungeons Dragons and the tabletop game, I fell in love with the land of Faerûn by the author and designer Ed Greenwood, and often in his books and quite often and his other material, the greeting was in the Forgotten Realms. Then I picked it up and started using it myself, which I have to say gets me a lot of strange looks at times because apparently it's more common in Canada where Ed Greenwood is from, and England. I guess it might be a UK-type greeting. Anyway, that's where it came from.

Can you share some of what inspired you to write Ballad of the House— what, Ballad of House Draconis? Have I got that right?

Yes, it's The Ballad of House Draconis. Actually, my original title was going to be Blood of Dragons, but I, uh, Googled that and found that there was a Chinese spy mystery by the same title, and then I still thought, well, maybe that's not really a problem because it's fan, not action-adventure mystery type thing. And, and then just shortly after that, Robin Hobbs released a book called Blood of Dragon, part of a new trilogy that she's putting out. And I said, uh, never mind, I will find something else. And then my developmental editor, uh, suggested to me, she says, well, since music is a theme throughout your planned series and your book developed off of music, why not tie music into those? And as it was, my planned titles, I only had music in one of the, uh, of the four book titles that I had. I have a planned four-book series plus a prequel, and I looked at the names I had for them and said to myself, wow, the This is inspired by music. There's a lot of music in it, and the music theme should be something that helps tie the elements of the books together. So I went through and thought about the Ballad of House Draconis would be a great— for the starting book. And then I will follow up with book 2, The Lay of Starstone Tower, and which will be launched hopefully in about a month. And then I have as a third book, The Song of the Owl, which was, as I said, the only one that did have music involved in the title. And then I will end up with The March to Glory. And of course, the— as it, as it mentions on the book there, on the book cover, the series name is The Glory Road, that being the name of the musical piece that I composed and recorded which became the music outline, I thought would be the musical outline for a book, and then I realized once I began to write, it was the outline for a series.

You sent me a graphic that showed that whatever you're doing for promotion seems to be working. It has a number of number ones, so would you like to explain that a little bit to us and give us some framework for that?

I have to credit my, my launch success with that, uh, Raven Paper Books. I'm a hybrid publisher. I worked with them. That's where my copy editor and all that are at. They're a fantastic team. I can't speak highly enough of them. They, uh, have a a tried and true launch method, which they're teaching me, and, and they will be helped by doing the same thing again with the second book. And then by then I should be ready to do it myself afterwards. They use people like, um, Reedsy, and I forget the names of the companies right off the top of my head. Naturally, I should have written them down and I didn't, but do promotions and They went through and they had it set up so that on the day of my launch, a promotion with, with one, and then on the second day there was another promotion on through the whole week. And I also have a fair community that I write with and that I game with, and I spread the word through all of those, all of my contacts there, and they all spread the, the word of mouth, which I think was all so well. And between that, we had some, well, pretty good figures there at Amazon. What really impressed me the most, I think, was that on Wednesday of that week, 1 in fantasy. And considering who he, uh, going up against, that was fantastic. And by the end of the week, I was only down, as you saw in there, down to 6. So I, I was Did pretty good that week, and my, my mark— expert was even more impressed by the fact that I, for one day, I was number one, uh, literary fiction, which includes things like Moby Dick and stuff like that, which admittedly is a bestseller every day. But just the fact that I was number one in that category was pretty impressive too.

It's all very impressive. Usually What I hear from authors is that the easy— the writing turns out to sometimes, except for writing block occasionally, is the, you know, that's the easy part. The rest of it is marketing and reviews, and whatever you're doing, it seems to be working. How did you approach world building for these stories? We talked about the music aspect and whatnot. Do you start with a map, a culture, a single character, or something else? What is your method there?

Well, as I mentioned before, I was a avid Dungeons Dragons player. I started playing Dungeons Dragons in 1978, and I— after about 3 sessions, my friends that were playing with me pulled me aside and said, hey, we love this game, but we don't like in this campaign We're going to run the campaign and we're going to play in your group now. And I sort of went, okay. So I was sort of pre-forced to build a world for my Dungeons Dragons game. I started out with a single city and one adventure off of that, and it grew. And over the time, my campaign ran from 1978 till 2011, so I guess I was considered fairly successful at it. Uh, we, we threw a couple of different editions of Dungeons Dragons. We started out playing the original Advanced Dungeons Dragons game, and then after about 10 years switched to the 2nd edition, and then later added some 3rd edition rules and whatnot as the best. But we did have sort of one, one place where we stopped playing the game we were in, the characters we were playing, and switch to a whole new group in a whole new world and start it over again. So needless to say, I had another whole world, um, which I actually combined the two, but I didn't let my players know that the, the things were separated by a magical force field. It didn't ever change until the very, very end campaign where the two worlds merged. But, uh, had extensive experience. And as a dungeon master, no matter how finely you create the world and create the adventure and everything, the people who are playing are going to do something you did not foresee. So you learn to sort of roll with the punches and create on by the seat of your pants. Well, I think this stood me in pretty good for when I began writing. I, as I also was a— been a musician for a number of years. I started playing in a— playing bass in a, like, a garage band in high school in the late '60s and learned to play acoustic guitar in the early '70s. And I had been writing some poetry when I was in high school, and then I got into writing song lyrics. And I've written hundreds of songs, and the band I played played with off and on for a couple of decades and recorded an album of our own music called The Journey. And from the songs that I'd written, some of which— the lyrics of some of which were even way from the poetry I'd written in the '60s. After I retired, I set out to record an album, a CD, a I have my own homemade recording studio. And so I put together these songs from over the decades that had a fantasy element to them and wrote a few new ones to tie it all together and composed an introduction, like a 17-minute opus, which combined a lot of the things from the the other songs and spoken piece, a prophecy. And then after I'd finished this entire thing and listened to it a few times, I said to myself, gosh, I like this. I'd like to read the story this is. I guess I'll have to write it. And so I began looking for a way to write because I hadn't done any real writing other than song lyrics since I was in high school. So I looked around for a class online. I went to a few free webinars, and on one of which there was a gentleman, Jerry, had as a guest presenter Gabriella Priera from New York. And listening to Gabriella, something sort of clicked. And she said something about, as a writer, you need a space that you can isolate yourself from the world where you can shut the door, you can Cut yourself off, turn your phone off, be away from all outside distractions except cats. Cats take priority. And that just so resonated with me because I'm a cat owner and a cat lover. I looked her up online, found her classes, and signed up for her DIY MFA program, the 101 program, and began to learn the nuts and bolts about writing. And it was there I learned a few things that I hadn't even really ever thought about, like promoting and community. When I started out to write my book, I had no plans of doing anything except writing this for myself. I wanted to read the story of the book that went, you know, the book that went with the music I had written. And After I was fairly well along in it and I had some good response from friends and people who I knew who, once they learned I was writing a book, they demanded that I share what I had with them. So I broke all the rules with beta readers, and there are some of my, quote, beta readers who were reading it chapter by chapter as I went along and offering their thoughts on it. But Generally, it worked out well. And the book that I wrote originally was so big that I had ended up cutting it in two. And The Ballad of House Draconis and The Lay of Starstone Towers were originally written as one book, which I was going to call The Blood of Dragons. But I found that I had a pretty good spot in the middle where I could divide it into two books. And as it is, each book is about 450 or more pages. So you can imagine it, if I had cut it, if I hadn't cut it in half, I would have had to trim it tremendously and it would have lost, I think, a great deal. But that was essentially how it was born, was from the musical outline that I had written and performed to deciding that I had to turn this into a book for myself, which ended up being Well, now that I've got this, I, I'd like to share it with the world. I, and so I went looking for publishers, and, and that was itself was an interesting, uh, an interesting task. I started querying agents in April or May of, of 2023, and by October, with about 115 rejection letters or ghosts, not everyone replied. I decided that I was going to take a break from doing that for a while. And I spoke with Gabriella, who's become my mentor, essentially, we're fast friends. And she said, you know, it's the end of the year, agents are probably pretty well filled up on their, you know, they're not really looking for anybody new right at the moment anyway, they're tying up all their loose ends, they're finishing up for the year. She says, it's absolutely fine for you to go ahead and take the rest of the year off and start querying again next year and do, do whatever you want to do in the time being. Just, you know, de-stress a little bit, relax. And so I did a NaNoWriMo, and it was there through a NaNoWriMo meeting that I actually, uh, a pre-NaNoWriMo that I ran into Morgan from Raven Paper Books. And I had seen something from her before, and it just came through me that I did not want to go through this querying process again, longer. I mean, I was, I was tired of it. It became so stressful by the end that, you know, I was only, I was only doing it once a week. I was only taking an hour or two on a Monday and doing like 5 query letters, going through QueryTracker, but it was still getting to be a real chore. I said, I think I will explore the hybrid publishing thing and see how that would work out. And it turns out that was the the way I wanted to go. That it turned out to be real, uh, the path I wanted to follow, I guess that's the best way I can put it. Because now I can, I can pick this up and, and say I have my book. I mean, just the fact I can hold it in my hands and have it there to reference for, uh, as I'm writing the third book in the series, I can look back in my own, own book. I don't have to look through notes or whatever.

I have it right there.

It's almost an existential feeling. It's just almost surreal to actually have this book. But anyway, that's, that's how I got to where I am now.

The funny thing is, so many authors, especially when they're just beginning, you, you have the book in your hand, it feels like you've accomplished something. But if you were to compare writing to a race, Congratulations, you made it all the way to the starting line. From the perspective of a short story writer, the concept of something larger than that in the realm that you work with is overwhelming. I, someday I'll try a novel.

Well, I have to say, Tim, that I'm looking at it from the opposite direction, and I admire people who can put something out in short form because I find that trying to put out a short story is much more daunting than trying to put out a novel because you have to be so precise, concise, and so compact. And at one time I said to my best friend, who's one of my beta readers, you know, I'm just realizing what a wordy fella I am. And he looked at me, or he— I was talking to him on the phone, so I could hear the the amazement in his voice though.

He says, "You're just figuring that out?" He says, "Where most people talk in sentences, you talk in paragraphs." It's sort of like comparing a song to a symphony, and they're in their different realms, but I respect that. Many of the authors I talk to say that their characters evolve on their own. Do any of your characters change in the process of writing?

Oh, oh, definitely. Um, I, I, I have had that same thing expressed to me, and I have to, have to agree with it, that a lot of people have said that their darn characters just won't do what they keep telling them to do. They go off in their own direction and they have a mind of their own. And I have found that's definitely been the case for myself. I have a— it's, it's a fanciful thought, and I don't take it too seriously, but I have expressed this thought at times that fiction writers are not writing fiction. They are actually historians channeling the stories that come to them from other dimensions in the multiverse as they occur. And if that's the case, we really have less control than, than we'd like to think.

That is an intriguing concept. Talking about the lighting— the writing process, do you have any rituals or habits that help you stay focused in creating while writing? Are you— you had to corral your characters, or what's your process?

Well, I guess I, I know that, uh, that, that there is the, the thought that there are two schools of writing, the plotters and the pantsers, and I actually think that's incorrect because that's being too black and white. There is that gray area in the middle, what we like to call the plancers, where we don't plot but we don't totally write by the seat of our pants either. In my case, I had a musical outline to go by, but what I generally do for any of my stories, uh, I have a beginning and I know where I want to end, and I usually have a few waypoints along the way but driving from point A to point B to point C is totally by the seat of my pants, or what I'm channeling in from the other universes, or whatever the case may be. But it's generally a very, very loose structure. I, like I said, I know where I'm starting and I know where I'm going. I just don't know how I'm going to get there.

Your characters take you by the hand and lead you from one to the other. I can imagine that. I think I know how you would answer this, but published or self-published, um, traditional published or, or self-published, and, and the reasons you're— for your choice?

Well, at first I wanted to go the traditional route, and that was why I queried agents for 6 months or more. However, having gone with the hybrid publisher and seen, seen the differences between what a traditional publisher does and what self-publishing, as with the hybrid publishing, offers you. I have decided that the way I'm going, the self-publishing route, is the way that's right for me because I own everything. The main problem I see with the traditional publisher is that once you sign that contract, your book doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to the traditional publisher. And they can do whatever they like with it. And as far as editing, cover concepts, the actual art, all of that stuff, depending on how they feel about you, allow you a lot of input. But then again, they may just say, no, no, we're doing it our way, we know best, be quiet, just sit there and, you know, don't bother us. Which would drive me bonkers, I guess. Also, amount of time. I didn't realize, I think, at the time how long it took from the time you finish writing until the time the book would hit the shelf. But with the traditional publisher, if you get— if you finish writing and the book is published within a year, you're doing— you're going quickly. And with the self-publishing and the hybrid thing, it's out as quickly as you want it to be. However, I want it to be as polished a product as it can be so it doesn't come out you know, 2 weeks after I finish writing it. There's a whole process I go through with my hybrid publishing company with— I work with a developmental editor, but, and then after we're finished with that, then I work with a copy editor, and then after we have a proofreader, and then it goes to the formatter, and the formatter does their magic. And I truly believe the formatter is an artist. It is a probably a very unappreciated art, but making a book look good is very important, I think, to the success of the book. The whole thing about you don't judge a book by a cover is nonsense, because that's how 90% of the people who buy a book, what they do judge the book by. Now, they may hate it afterwards, but that cover is what brought their attention in the first So that's very important. And then once you start reading, if the formatting of the book is good, it's got things there that attract your attention but that don't distract from the story. They enhance the story. And the formatter I work with here at Raven Paper Books, Julia, she is fantastic. She is an artist. I cannot praise her enough. I am so happy with the way my book looks and the appearances on the inside. And because of its being self-published, there were things I was able to do that I probably wouldn't— I might have, but probably wouldn't have gotten away with, with a traditional publisher. I use a little glyph as a point of view indicator at the start of every scene that shows who is speaking. The shirt I'm wearing That is the birthmark of Arthos, Arthos Daedraconis, the crown prince who is the protagonist in my, my first book and through the series. I use these, the little birthmark images that I made, to be a point of view indicator for each of my characters. So at the beginning of each scene, there'll be this little picture that shows like what I have on my shirt there that shows this is who's speaking, as well as having their name and a little bit of other information at the very beginning, which I've seen other, other authors do when they're indicating whose point of view it is. But the reason that I prefer the self-publishing and hybrid thing, I think, is just because of the, the control that it gives me.

I understand you're a member of a writer's group, is that correct?

Uh, actually I'm a member of several writers groups, uh, but yes, the, um, when I joined Gabriella's DIY MFA program and I finished the first class, the, uh, the DIY MFA 101 class, which taught me the, the nuts and bolts about writing and also gave me the beginnings of the what's needed for a platform, and it introduced to me the concept of community, which is something I had never even thought about before. And I remember saying something in an email to one of the members of the— of her group. I was having problems finding a writing community here in South Carolina. I've been looking online and I finally did connect with the South Carolina Writers Writing Group, but it took me a little while to find them. And anyway, I was sort of lamenting that I didn't have a community, and she said, but you have us. And I realized it was true because they at times were offering a weekly writing group which I had joined, and the, uh, DIY MFA program offers a group called The Hub, which essentially is all the members who join have access to all of Gabriella's podcasts and lots of her other learning tools. And one of the things that they offered at the time was a Thursday night weekly writing group. Now, in the meantime, since that time, the Hub-sponsored group has had to fold, but the people who were in it didn't want to stop. So one of the members opened up their own Zoom channel and their own group, and we just all sort of migrated to her channel. She's in Australia, so she's doing the group at like 8 o'clock in the morning while the rest of us are all in the US at anywhere from 7 till, uh, oh, I think 5 o'clock in the, in the afternoon depending on where we are or where we're at. But. We get together every Thursday night, chat for a little bit, and then write for an hour. Also, in the Paper Raven Books, they have what they call writing events Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday every week. So I get in a Zoom channel every day, 1 o'clock, Monday and Tuesday and Thursday. 11 o'clock on Wednesday, and we get together, we chat a little bit, and we write for an hour. So I'm, I'm in a lot of writing groups.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give other writers? And I think one of them would be join a group.

Absolutely. I would, I would say to someone, uh, the myth of the author, uh, you know, struggling away in the, in the garret or the cabin out in the woods or whatever might be a very romantic thought, but when it comes down to writing, there's some sort of synergy that comes out of being with other people who are also writing. Maybe it's just accountability. You know that they're writing, so you have to write also, or whatever it is. But I also noticed that that time flies by so quickly. It's so easy to get in the writing groove once you're accustomed to it, I guess. But it flies by so quickly that you'll sit there and you'll be writing and they'll say, "Time's up," and you'll say, "You lie! It's only been 10 minutes. It's only been 15 minutes." But no, it's been the hour and you're just so in the groove that it doesn't seem to even— you know, it's just astonishing the amount you can get done. I average probably somewhere between 700 to 1,000 words every hour when I'm in that session, and it's much lower when I'm just writing on my own. I, I'm not sure why, if it's just because I get distracted easier or whatever, but I would say writing on my own, it's probably more like 500 words in an hour. Or, you know, it depends. In the groove, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. But in that writing group session, it just seems to be so much easier to be in the groove.

Another factor with, or another feature of joining a group, is the is the critique and getting the perspective of 12 to 20 to 30 different pair sets, you know, eyes, uh, get— is, is of great advantage to a writer.

Absolutely. That is another advantage I have of being a member of the, uh, Raven Paper Books because they offer a— every, every Thursday afternoon at, uh, 4 o'clock Eastern time we have a— it's either a writing critique session or a question and answer session with 3 of the coaches. Um, it happens to be my dev editor, my copy editor, and my proofreader. Um, but they sit there and they will answer any questions you might have. And also they look at weekly submissions from whoever cares to submit. And there's usually anywhere from 3 to 5 people who will put in a 10-page double-spaced sample of their work, whatever it is they're working on or whatever it is they're having problems with or anything that they would like to invite critique on. And it's something that once you join the Paper Raven Book community, it's not something that says, okay, we've gone through and we've published your first book. You're, you're done, you're out, you're not— you're on your own now unless you want to come back and, and pay us some more money to do some more things. Once you join Paper Raven Books, this, this feature and the writing group stuff is yours forever. As long as you want to show up and, and participate, you get these options just, just for being a part of that community. So it's tremendously, uh, tremendously— obviously tremendously advantage for me to be able to talk to my dev editor constantly as I'm working without having to submit the entire thing to her and then have her go through it and do it, which she will do at the time when I'm done with the book. But this gives her a case of being able to offer me suggestions as we go along and also keeps her well attuned to where the story's going. So when the time comes for her, it's much easier.

Casey Cooper, thank you very much for being with us. I've got your website up on the screen for anybody which wishes to visit you. Can't talk. I can write, but I can't talk sometimes. But if anybody wants to visit you, there's your website is on the screen. Thank you for joining us on Author to Author. Please share this video with your friends on social media. Remember to click the like and subscribe buttons. Click the bell so you'll be reminded when it's time for the next chapter of Author to Author.