My name is James. Yes, I'm a dude.

My middle name is Mark, which my parents had intended to call me. My Southern Grandmother set her heart on Jim. But my Chinese Grandmother (Yin Yin) had other plans. James translated to the Chinese name Ja mei, which for everyone else became Jamie.

Yin Yin, by the way, also went on to rename several other relatives. My cousin Hannah became Han-ya. Judith became Ju-Ju. And Dolores, well Dolores somehow became Stephanie. She didn't even know her real name until she went to get her first driver's license and had to dig out her birth certificate.

Career-wise, I went to art school in Seattle to become an illustrator, and ended up an art director/copywriter. I've won an embarrassingly large amount of meaningless awards including 400+ Addys, 7 Best-of-Shows, and my work has appeared in Adweek, Advertising Age, Graphis and Communication Arts. I also had a commercial appear on an episode of The U.K.'s Funniest Commercials inspired by an embarrassing incident with a bidet that I'd rather not go into right now.

On the writerly side, I won the 2006 Clarity of Night Short Fiction Contest, was First Runner-Up in the 2006 Midnight Road Reader's Choice Awards and was a Top-25 finalist in Glimmer Train's Fall 2006 Short Story Award For New Writers. I've been published in The Picolata Review, and my fiction is online at Flashing in the Gutters and Fictional Musings. I'm also an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and a survivor of Orson Scott Card's Literary Bootcamp.

My debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet will be released by Ballantine--January 27, 2009.

On the personal side, I'm the proud father of two boys and two girls. Yep, it's chaos, but the good kind of chaos.