Over at the USA Today Happily Ever After blog I’m interviewing two wonderful steampunk authors – Gail Carriger of The Parasol Protectorate series and Cindy Spencer Pape of The Gaslight Chronicles.

In fact, Cindy was the person who first got me interested in steampunk, when we met as Carina Press authors several years ago. She has a wonderful dog in her books, named George and she was kind enough to send me the magnet featuring him, which has stayed on my refrigerator for several years now (even though I’m a cat person LOL).

I thoroughly enjoyed the Gail Carriger series as well and especially the trip to Egypt in the last book, Timeless.

I LOVE the look of steampunk – the jewelry especially. I’m going to have an opportunity to attend a steampunk-themed costume dinner at the Romance Writers of America national conference in July and I’m giving my imagination free rein as far as the outfit and the accessories.

I’m sure there are many great sources for finding cool steampunk items to admire but one I regularly follow on Facebook and Twitter is Steampunk Tendencies. There are vehicles, cosplay, art…think Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, as if the realities they wrote about had become the actual world, using steam power, instead of going down the path of technology we did follow. The 1964 movie “First Men In The Moon” is a good example of how Mr. Wells thought the future might be. Disney’s 1954 version of  Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was another movie that attempted to bring the look and feel of that alternate technology to life, although I think mostly people remember Kirk Douglas fighting off the giant octopus more than anything else!