For those who love the ladies, there’s a new anthology out today:

Editor: A.M. Leibowitz:

We had everything from actual plays to space operas to period pieces to contemporary romance. These talented storytellers captured womanhood, and women on stage and screen, in all their beautiful, wonderful glory. In the end, I was only able to take ten stories. These are the ones that made me laugh and cry and want to sing. There are erotic and sensual tales, gender non-conformity, trans women, lesbians and bisexuals, politics, falling in love, parenting, youthful crushes, opera, toe-tapping musical numbers, death-defying stunts, humor, and more. This anthology is a celebration.

Authors: Aila Alvina Boyd, Renee Young, Marolyn Krasner, Althea Blue, Geonn Cannon, Allison Fradkin, JL Merrow, Kathleen Jowitt, Debbie McGowan, Sonni de Soto

Including my steampunk story, London Lark:

Repairing a salvaged automaton becomes a labour of love for apprentice tinkerer Harriet Hodgkins. But the clockwork coquette is destined for resale, and Miss Pandora’s restoration will signal their separation—unless Hodgkins can engineer a more auspicious ending.

Available in ebook from Supposed Crimes | Amazon

Here’s the start of my story:

The first time I met Miss Pandora Piper, her what was to become the shining star of the Criterion and the darling of London society, she was in a right state, lying in the gutter with both legs broken and her head hanging off to one side.

“It’s proper criminal,” I told my gaffer, old Arthur the tinkerer, as folks call him, although it’s Mr Tunstall to the likes of you and me, “what the toffs’ll do to their playthings.”

Top notch goods, she was, fine featured and with soft ivory skin, so lifelike you’d almost have mistaken her for human, if it hadn’t been for the metal poking out of her poor torn limbs. Lying there abandoned in the gutter, like any other beggar what’s fallen on hard times. “It ain’t right,” I muttered.

“Now then, Hodgkins,” old Arthur said in that soothing old gin-and-baccy voice of his. “We’ll see her straight, don’t you fret. Grab her shoulders—I’ll take the other end, wouldn’t want a young lad like you seeing something he shouldn’t, heh heh heh—and we’ll heave her up on the cart. And no letting that head fall, neither. She don’t need no more dents in her poor face, Lord love her.”

Now, I ain’t a lad, I’m older than I look, and I didn’t reckon Miss Pandora (as we later called her) had anything up her skirts I hadn’t seen every day of my life and twice on Sundays, that being bath night, but neither did I fancy a clip round the ear and a lost place, so I kept mum and did as I was told.