Nick Valentino in Dreams of Steam

Good news in the publishing and Steampunk worlds!  A new steampunk anthology has just been released,  Dreams of Steam and is available at Barnes & Noble.  What makes it even better is it features a story by my friend Nick Valentino.  Engine 316 is  a story where he takes a weird west steampunk angle.  I can't wait.  I've been looking for a new steampunk anthology which features contemporary writers with new works as opposed to reprints. Although I love what the Van Der Meers did for the genre in their anthology simply titled,  Steampunk,  I wish there had been more from new writers. Although, on the other hand, someone did need to set the historical precedents all in one place and they were the perfect pair to perform such a feat.

I met Nick at The South Carolina Literary Conference and discovered he was a great guy as well as a steampunk author of note.  His book, Thomas Riley, is a rollicking steampunk ride - inventive, quirky, full of  technological marvels, alchemy, airships and action!  It's available both in print and on kindle at Amazon and you can get a signed copy at a variety of Cons. He travels all the time and I'm looking forward to his panel at Dragon Con in Atlanta. I don't know if I mentioned this before. but I'm even more pleased because a few weeks ago Nick notified me that I'd won a pair of goggles from him in a Twitter contest.
And as a fan of steampunk, who is currently writing steampunk short stories and novels, including: Foxglove Broadsides, The Orchid Collector and Marquete de Fleur, and also building a character or characters (steam printer, botanist obsessed with poisonous plants and hot air balloonist) I was in dire need of goggles, not knowing how to make them and not having procured them yet.  I focused a bit too much on the "pretties" of the genre and neglected the necessities, as I am wont to do often, I'm afraid.