Ep 062 – Celebrating Perfect Unions

June 17, 2016

It gives us great pleasure to announce B.G. Thomas, J. Scott Coatsworth, Jamie Fessenden, and Michael Murphy as the guest panel on episode 062: Celebrating Perfect Unions!
Join us as we discuss the one-year anniversary of marriage equality, what it feels like to have equal rights, the joy of celebrating love, and the anthology these four authors have written to commemorate the historic moment.

You can buy this anthology from one of these vendors:

• Amazon
• Dreamspinner ebook
• Dreamspinner paperback
• Barnes & Noble
• Apple/iTunes
• Kobo
• All Romance eBooks

** Note: this title releases on June 26, but all vendors are taking pre-orders now! **

Bios:

B.G. Thomas lives in Kansas City with his husband of more than a decade. They’ve been married twice. First in 2005—although it wasn’t legal. They jumped the broom (as well as the sword) and were married in heart in front of their friends and loved ones. Then in 2014, they flew to Baltimore and made it legal (and couldn’t have without the help of B.G.’s fans who practically funded the entire weekend!). He can’t get enough of seeing that gold wedding band on his hand, even two years later.
B.G. loves romance, comedies, fantasy, science fiction, and even horror—as far as he is concerned, as long as the stories are character driven and entertaining, it doesn’t matter the genre. He has gone to conventions his entire adult life where he’s been lucky enough to meet many of his favorite writers. He has made up stories since he was a child; it is where he finds his joy.
Excited about the growing male/male romance market, he submitted a story and was thrilled when it was accepted in four days. Since then the stories have poured out of him. “It’s like I’m somehow making up for a lifetime’s worth of stories!”
“Leap, and the net will appear” is his personal philosophy and his message to all. “It is never too late,” he states. “Pursue your dreams. They will come true!”
http://bthomaswriter.wordpress.com/

J. Scott Coatsworth is the admin for the Queer Sci Fi site. He has been writing since elementary school, when he and won a University of Arizona writing contest in 4th grade for his first sci fi story (with illustrations!). He finished his first novel in his mid twenties, but after seeing it rejected by ten publishers, he gave up on writing for a while. Over the ensuing years, he came back to it periodically, but it never stuck. Then one day, he was complaining to Mark, his husband, early last year about how he had been derailed yet again by the death of a family member, and Mark said to him “the only one stopping you from writing is you.” Since then, Scott has gone back to writing in a big way, selling more than a dozen stories – some new, some that he had started years before. He’s embarking on two new sci fi trilogies, and also runs Queer Sci Fi, a group of readers and writers of gay sci fi, fantasy, paranormal and horror fiction. Scott sold his first story, a magical realism short called “The Bear at the Bar”, to Dreamspinner for the “A Taste of Honey” anthology (Dreamspinner, Amazon), which came out in August 2014. He has since had a novella “Between the Lines” published by DSP, and has another coming out in June. “Flames” will be part of the marriage equality anthology “A More Perfect Union”, and is the story he is most proud of to date.
http://queerscifi.com/author-j-scott-coatsworth/

Jamie Fessenden is an author of gay fiction in many genres. Most involve romance, because he believes everyone deserves to find love, but after that anything goes: contemporary, science fiction, historical, paranormal, mystery, or whatever else strikes his fantasy. Jamie Fessenden set out to be a writer in junior high school. He published a couple short pieces in his high school’s literary magazine and had another story place in the top 100 in a national contest, but it wasn’t until he met his partner, Erich, almost twenty years later, that he began writing again in earnest. With Erich alternately inspiring and goading him, Jamie wrote several screenplays and directed a few of them as micro-budget independent films. He then began writing novels and published his first novella in 2010. After nine years together, Jamie and Erich have married and purchased a house together in the wilds of Raymond, New Hampshire, where there are no street lights, turkeys and deer wander through their yard, and coyotes serenade them on a nightly basis. Jamie recently left his “day job” as a tech support analyst to be a full-time writer.
https://jamiefessenden.com

Michael Murphy has been interested in everything around him his entire life – wanting to see new places, meet new people, tell new stories. Writing has been the culmination of a long term dream. For as long as he can remember he’s been writing stories. What has been different over the last five years is that he’s finally been brave enough to allow someone else to read what he’s written. When that happened he found that others liked what he’d written which made him beyond happy. In addition to writing, his other love is photography. Taking photos of some of the beautiful men of the world is his current focus. With any luck, one of those photos will grace the cover of a Dreamspinner novel in the near future. He and his husband have traveled the world, trying to see as much as possible. When not traveling, they live in Washington, DC with their best friend, a throw-away dog they adopted twelve years ago. To pay the bills, he is the Director of Information Technology for a national organization based in Washington, DC.
http://gayromancewriter.com