Air Pirates in a Steampunk World

(Jonathan's Note: Please welcome our first guest blogger, author Jaq D Hawkins! Jaq's first steampunk novel, The Wake of the Dragon, is getting excellent reviews, and has a 4 1/2 star rating, on Amazon. Recently, I asked Jaq if she would like to write the first guest blog here to talk about steampunk and her novel.

Here is Jaq's bio, from her Amazon author page: Jaq D Hawkins is a published writer with 9 books in publication in the Mind, Body and Spirit field published by Capall Bann Publishing as well as four Fantasy novels in print and E-book; The Goblin Trilogy which consists of Dance of the Goblins, Demoniac Dance, and Power of the Dance (Combined Trilogy edition available in paperback and only on Amazon in ebook form), also the Steampunk book, The Wake of the Dragon, an airship pirate adventure among the opium trade in an alternative history.

With no further ado, I turn you over to the capable words of Jaq D Hawkins!)

The Steampunk Genre

We hear a lot about Steampunk these days, but looking through the selection of books categorised under the genre doesn't shed much light on what Steampunk is meant to be. The consensus tends to be a 19th Century setting, usually either in Victorian England or the Wild West, with alternative history that includes steam and clockwork technology, airships commonly flying through the skies and very cliché Victorian mannerisms.

The stories themselves deviate into several genres. The Romance stories often include vampires, werewolves and/or zombies (don't ask me why). Mystery stories equal Romance in frequency and sometimes have the occasional supernatural turn in some manner. What I find strange is that the Adventure stories, which to me seems the obvious direction for a setting that includes airships, have mostly been in the YA category.

Before anyone brings me up on it, Jules Verne is often cited as a forerunner of Steampunk, but the category didn't exist in his time and how we interpret his wonderful adventure stories bears little resemblance to the categories in which literature was sorted when his books were written.

Steampunk reaches beyond literature to fashion and music. It was music that first introduced me to Steampunk, in the form of a band called Abney Park and their song, Airship Pirates.

The video I first saw is no longer on YouTube, but this one gives an idea of the costuming that combined with the drama of the song to inspire me with the idea that I wanted to write about airship pirates. I later learned that the singer in the band, Captain Robert Brown, was writing a story of his own, but I haven't yet read it and only recently learned that it did get released in 2011.

The Wake of the Dragon: A Steampunk Adventure

In the meantime I wrote my own Steampunk story, The Wake of the Dragon: A Steampunk Adventure. As the subtitle suggests, it's an adventure story about a gang of airship pirates who fly at storm's edge to conduct raids. They steal a shipment of opium, already waylaid from the East India Company by a dubious businessman, and a selection of odd characters including spies, a farm girl and a bumbling clerk all become involved in the businessman's attempts to recover his stolen goods.

It's all good fun and has recently been released on audiobook, and is also available in both paperback and all ebook formats. In the meantime, one of the characters, Mister Bale, has insisted on having his own story, so a second Steampunk novel is now in the works. A taste of it will appear in the 2015 edition of Of Words and Water, an anthology in support of the WaterAid charity to which I contribute regularly.

Steampunk is a genre with a lot of scope for combining history with imagination. I've just acquired a sample of Captain Brown's book and look forward to reading his visions of the life of airship pirates in a Steampunk world. In the meantime, The Wake of the Dragon can be found in all formats on Amazon or on Smashwords for other ebook formats, and paperback direct from Lulu.

Come on an adventure with me!

Jonathan's Notes: More About Jaq

Yes, this is Jonathan again! In formatting Jaq's post for the blog (this is no fault of her own... my blog platform necessitates that I add back italics, links, and the like), I learned more about our guest.

Jaq was recently interviewed for the Night Horse Publishing House blog. You can read more about her thoughts on steampunk, her education, and more!

Here are more of Jaq's links so you can keep up with her:

A Word on the Mailing List

As always, for interesting extras, join the mailing list! The list always goes beyond what is in the blog. In an extremely rare instance of me using a sports analogy, you can think of it as a post-game show about writing, steampunk, and related topics.

Also, I plan on starting an autoresponder soon, a series of three or four message to get new readers caught up on this blog and on me, your host. Before the responder goes live, I will zip them into one file and email a link to the list, so that original readers don't miss out. So, that's something to look forward to.

And, if you have any ideas for what I should include in that list, please let me know in the comments!