Happy Saturday! It’s Pride in my city, and my family will be in the parade with a group from our church. My younger child insisted I needed a better shirt this year, so I bought one. Pictures next week. 🙂
Today, I won’t be sharing from my own work. At least, not from something I wrote. The anthology I curated for Supposed Crimes, UPSTAGED! An anthology of women who love women in performing arts, is finally available. I love every single one of these.
I’ll share snippets of other ones in the future, but I’m starting with one by JL Merrow, since she’s one of our regular Snippeters. Her story is a highly original steampunk, and it’s simply delightful.
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.”
Blurb: London Lark, JL Merrow – 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.
Rainbow Snippets is a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQIA+ authors, readers, and bloggers to share 6 sentences each week from a work of fiction—published or in-progress—or a book recommendation. Feel free to join in!