The books: and here they are. Six novels, a novella, three collections of short stories and a book of poetry, so far. To find out more about each book, click on the links on each book title on the Home page or on the BOOKS tab at the top of the page to see some of the background to the book and extracts from it.
The Big 313 comprises the first stories I ever wrote and more besides. Inevitably, a few are derived from my time working in special needs, but most are not.
Fire and Rain is the first novel I wrote and it took years. It's a mystery and romance partly set in Iran, after the revolution. Helen Dunmore, author of Birdcage Walk, said she regarded her first novel as an apprenticeship and she's right about that. It takes time to learn the craft and I probably haven't learned enough yet.
Dan Cooper
Hey ho, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. It's taken a while to get here, to the point when I'm doing something I always wanted to do. Being a writer.
The Life Story part: skipping the early years, I trained as a teacher and ended up being one for what felt like decades. Maybe it was. However long it was, I paid my dues, I did the time, and now I'm free. The good period was the time I spent in special educational needs. I enjoyed it because I cared about all the children and young people I taught who had special needs, and because I cared about the families who supported them, worried about them, and grew with them.
Why writing? Because I'm a reader. Ever since I can remember, I've read books, or indeed, anything with words on it. Cereal boxes, road signs, all of it. I wanted to know what all the squiggles meant. One of my earliest memories is prising open a battered annual my mum got from a jumble sale and trying to make sense of all the marks. Then I discovered the Griffin Readers at infant school. From the earliest years I've read, and it was only natural to eventually want to write the words as well.
Training as a teacher wasn't my first choice. I studied English Literature and ended up doing a PGCE in case no one wanted to give a job to a young man with a shiny new and massively useful degree in Literature. I should have been an airline pilot or business magnate, but ended up teaching English in comprehensives and finally, working with children who had special needs. I'm glad I did, because otherwise I'd never have met those young heroes, never learned what it is to have true courage; never known the parents who persevered against the odds, against all the education system could throw at them, simply because they loved their children and wanted the best for them, no matter what. Heroes, every one. I will never forget them.
Like so many teachers, I quit eventually. You burn out. Much as you want to, you can't take any more. I opted for a part-time admin job to give me time to write. For the past several years, that's what I've done The result is the books on this website.
Lakara's Warehouse is a romance novella telling the story of a man who gives up a steady job in PR to become a social worker. While training, he meets six-year-old Lakara and her mum Shara, and life is never the same again.
The Marianne Summer is a contemporary adventure romance with a parallel about the British women of the Special Operations Executive & the French Resistance they fought with at the end of the second world war.
Prairie Girl is a short, psychological novel about what love can do to a person. The havoc, the turmoil, the danger. It also contains a mystery.
Dance Again is set against the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Algeria in 2010. It's my favourite book.
Love, Sicily is a story of young love going wrong and their efforts to put it right again.
Swans is a second collection of short stories, perhaps more layered than those in The Big 313 and each one featuring a female protagonist. For this reason it's subtitled: Ten Stories, Ten Heroines.
A Room of Her Own is my third collection of short stories, a diverse set.
The Tall Grasses is a collection of some of the poetry I've written over the years.
And now ... I'm currently completing my sixth novel, Blackbirds. It's about an anthropologist who gets involved in finding a lost community in the year 2,300 B.C., a community devastated by a natural disaster but which had a very special woman in it .....
All books will be available on Amazon soon. If you want to read any, you're most welcome. If you don't, that's fine, you can always read the free extracts I'm putting on the individual book pages as well as the previews that are avaiable FREE on Amazon. Just click the Amazon link beneath each book and you'll go straight to its Amazon page. Look for preview under the book cover and you can read the first 2,000-5,000 words. For now, thanks for visiting my website and whatever you read, I hope you enjoy it.
About Me
