Steam Beast Art Contest!

This is a Steampunk art contest to celebrate the release of the new book, Songs for a Machine Age, coming out from Hadley Rille Books in November:

"There is a place where fabulous clockwork Devices fill Festival streets with color and sound.

Where the Gear Tourniers, in their places of high learning, keep alive the memory of the cruel horrors of an industrial past, now overthrown.

Where skill of the hand and grace of the body are markers of true belief.

Elena Alkeson has been on the run for six years. Wanted by the fanatical Duke of Melifax for witchcraft, she is safe nowhere in Devien, as her gift for sensing impending disaster comes with a price: she can't keep her mouth shut.

…Until she meets Fen, who shares a similar gift: the gift of seeing inside mechanisms and knowing what they do. Elena and Fen must flee for their lives, going to the capital City of Helseve to seek asylum. Amidst the machinery and brilliance of the Autumn Festival, Fen and Elena find friendship, danger, and some powerful allies.

But Melifax and his dour Browns are determined to bring the people of Devien into a new age, an age of moralism, conformity and mass production, ensuring that the beauty and pageantry of Devien and its Devices will be lost forever."

To enter the contest, do the following:

-- Read snippets about the mysterious mechanical character called the Steam Beast (find the link here at the contest announcement). 

-- Try to envision the Steam Beast, and make an artistic representation (2D or 3D) of what you think it looks like.

-- Email the author at heather AT heathermcdougal DOT com, sending her good-quality digital images by midnight on Sunday, October 28.

-- Results will be announced November 1st on the author's website.

GRAND PRIZE is $200 and a signed copy of the book.

3 RUNNERS UP will receive a signed copy of the book

All winners will be broadcast around the internet as much as possible!

You can also read the first chapter of the book here.