About Jon

October 29th, 2009

So. You must want to know about Jon Cooper. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. Unless you’re lost, or just ‘surfing’. I hear the ‘stuff I like’ page has some good, um, stuff….

Where should we start? The childhood spent feeding dead woodlice to hedgehogs? The teenage years of death metal and amateur athletics? Or the academic career spent observing fish sex? I’m suggesting we needn’t explore these dark ages just now. Instead, let’s roll back the years to 2002….

Sheffield, South Yorkshire. A veritable hotbed of employment opportunities for a fresh-faced biology graduate from The University of Hull (insert Blackadder quote here). Quite why Coops ended up with a daily commute back to his hometown of Chesterfield, no-one knows. Lonely winter evenings were spent writing, and then deleting, pages of drivel about fallen winter leaves and arty photographs of Pearl Jam. Numerous ‘modern classics’ were read, and not properly understood. We’ll call these ‘The Nursery Years’ – a vital period of development, but with an output akin to what you may expect to find in the underwear of those attending such an institution.

Events then occurred, in an order. Marriage, job changes, house moves, more job changes, a revisit to studentdom, children…. Over this transition period, short stories began to appear. Coops discovered that if you write about your dreams and countries that no-one else you know has been to, you can pretty much say whatever you want. He even dabbled in the world of journalism, writing spoof match reports for his five-a-side football team, and reviewing demos and gigs for an online music magazine. These provided an outlet for Coops’ rapier-like wit, as well as helping to develop such skills as editing, working to a deadline, and knowing how to write good, like what authors do.

Somewhere along the line, it seemed a good idea to start work on a novel. Previous attempts had seen limited success; copying out, word for word, a book on trees at the age of seven was dismissed as plagiarism, and the aforementioned epic about leaves and Pearl Jam totalled about one-and-a-half pages, just short of the two hundred and fifty-odd required for the average bestseller. Yet here we are, eighteen months into the journey, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Words, sentences, paragraphs – yes, even chapters – have been written, and several independent sources have verified that they make sense….. Could Jon Cooper be the saviour of teenage fiction?

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