I've had a craving for some good steampunk for awhile now. And now I'm going to go all Little Miss Pickybritches on you, because there are things I really don't like in the genre.
1) I want actual female characters. Women who do things, and have conversations that don't revolve around romance or men. Mercedes Lackey does good woman characters. As does Anne McCaffrey. Killashandra, anyone? Look to Whitechapel Gods for inspiration on this.
2) I want some plot explanations, even if the author has to hold a character down and force them to play Exposition Bitch for a few pages. Scar Night is an excellent example of this - it's a really cool setting populated with characters who keep wandering around doing things, or not being allowed to sanctify their dead loved ones (WTF is up with that?), and there's something going on with angels, but it makes no sense because there IS NO EXPOSITION BITCH!!!
3) Romance is encouraged, but only good romance that actually involves the characters falling in love with each other's faults and annoying habits, instead of meeting and declaring eternal love five minutes later. (redwulf and I waited a good three weeks before we declared our love, dammit!)
4) I anyone can find me some good, plotty, well written Adventures of Jules Verne fanfic, I would do an SCA Dance of Joy.
5) Alt history with steampunk and magic is good. Me likes alt history.
6) Re: 4 - I am open to fanfic that fits the above list, including, but not limited to: AUs, slash, and OTP(3, 4 etc), and any fandom.
7) Happy endings are preferred.

Assuming anyone can find something that meets the insanely high standards set above (especially 1), I will give you many thanks.

Insanely high indeed, kbrook! Good luck! I for one can't rec any to you.

kbrook, maybe you'll like these:

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http://read.freeforum.ca/elizabeth-bear-4-cyberpunk-novels-vt6999.html

Elizabeth Bear - 4 cyberpunk novels

Elisabeth Bear in her own words:

"The three Jenny Casey books -- Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired -- were written as one novel, but not all at the same time. At the end of Hammered I knew I had gotten to a pause point, not the end of the story. Scardown is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, because of that really downer ending. I used a classical three-act structure because it's a thriller plot, so you have the ascending action, then this nadir point at the end of the second book -- though in the third book, Worldwired, things actually get worse. Finding a suitable climax was quite a challenge, since it's hard to come up with a bigger threat than what happened in the second book. I have ideas for two more books set in that milieu at some point in the future, but they probably would not have the same characters (I'm a very character-driven writer).

"There's a lot in those books that's intentionally a tour of the last 30 years of science fiction: a cyberpunk thread, a military history thread, a singularity thread. They're very self-aware books, with a lot of participation in the 'genre conversation' and looking at the way the various tracks in that conversation interlink. People talk about science fiction splitting into all these subgenres that have nothing to do with each other, but really they all come from the same place; they're just approaching it from different angles."

... at least the main character is a she