Over at USA Today Happily Ever After blog, I’m interviewing more steampunk authors for the SciFi Encounters column. I started with Susan Kaye Quinn, whose “bollypunk” novel Third Daughter really grabbed my attention and kept me reading nonstop. It’s the first part of a trilogy, although fully satisfying in its own right, so now I can’t wait for the next book. And then my friend PJ Schnyder turned me on to the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, a series by Pip Ballentine and Tee Morris. Dawn’s Early Light was the most recent releases in that series. So I had extra fun interviewing Pip and Tee. I LOVE the look of steampunk. I wish there were more and better movies featuring this genre. I let Pip and Tee do the movie-recommending for the SciFi column but before they weighed in with “Van Helsing”, I was thinking about “The Three Musketeers” of 2011, which featured “gearpunk” dirigibles built to DaVinci’s airship blueprints, stolen by Cardinal Richelieu’s agents of course. The tagline for the movie is  “Every legend has a new beginning.” I enjoyed parts of that movie although I had to begin by disassociating it in my head from the actual Three Musketeers.

I’ve read and reread the novel by Alexandre Dumas any number of times and for me the definitive movie is always going to be the 1970’s version filmed by Richard Lester, with a screenplay by George MacDonald Fraser. I’m quite eager to see the latest BBC TV series based on the book, however. I’d been reading the weekly reviews at Den of Geek in England and was so jealous we couldn’t watch the show over here. But now BBC America  is running the show. (Alas, opposite apocalyptic series “The Last Ship” but I’ll catch up on All The Things at some point.) I’m still assembling components for my costume for the steampunk dinner party at the Romance Writers of America conference later this month. Here are my two latest acquisitions, a cannon ring and COOL goggles: