Hello world!

I thought about changing the name of this first post to be something more original, but as a computer geek, I appreciate the “ancient” tradition of your first program in a new computer language being something that just prints the words “Hello, world!” on the computer screen.  So I’ll leave it as it is.

My name is Jamie Fessenden, and I’m a gay man living in southern New Hampshire who writes fiction with gay central characters.  I’ve just signed my first publishing contracts, so, as of December this year (2010), I will be able to officially call myself an author.  I’ve been doing it for a while, of course, but without anything actually published, there was always that nagging voice in the back of my head, adding the caveat, “Well, sort of…”

Dreamspinner Press  will be publishing my short story “The Meaning of Vengeance,” about two men in Viking Age Iceland who, as the sole survivors of a fifteen-year blood feud, chose to put the feud behind them and end up falling in love.  Dreamspinner will also be publishing my long novella, “The Christmas Wager,” a Christmas story that takes place in Victorian England.  I’m incredibly excited to be working with Dreamspinner and hope to publish many more stories with them, in the future.

Since “gay marriage” (I prefer the term “marriage equality”) is now legal in the state of New Hampshire, my fiance and I are going to be married in a Victorian-themed wedding this November, after having been together for nine years.  We’ve already bought a wonderful house together on nearly eight acres of land and adopted a lovable oaf of a black lab, so my life is pretty fantastic, right now. 

I’m a moderately prolific writer of gay fiction, so I intend to use this blog to talk about stories I’m working on and hopefully promote stories that get published.  I have a few young adult novels that are in various stages of completion.  I’ll be shopping those around soon, though at the moment, I’m at a loss as to where to send them.  And in November I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo again, knocking out the adult murder mystery I’ve been outlining.