I got Phil SimCity for an early birthday present. I admit it, I totally don’t understand games like this – if I look at the screen for thirty seconds I start getting bored.

“Look, you can click on anything and see more about it.” Phil clicks on a boy running down the street.

“Can you squash him?”

“What? No, you can’t squash him, what’s wrong with you? It’s not a god game.”

“Then what fun is it if you can’t squash him?”

“IT’S NOT A GOD GAME.”

I can’t help it…I like to blow shit up. :) My city would have a red light district, zombie attacks and Godzilla smooshing everything…but you probably can’t do that, even though it would be a better game for it.

I’m so excited to be able to reveal this cover finally: Fall of Sky City, by the very wonderful S. M. Blooding. I love this cover so much; it was a lot of fun to work on and Frankie was great to work with.

In a world governed by the opposing forces of the mystical House of Tarot and the tribal Great Families, Synn is caught in the crossfire. He witnesses the slaughter of innocent people, and the devastating murder of his father. This act awakens his Mark of power, a Mark greater than any the world has seen in a very long time.

Queen Nix thought she won a great prize when she destroyed Synn’s father, the leader of the strongest Great Families. She had no idea she’d be doubly blessed by capturing his son. However, before Synn can become her treasured weapon, before she can use him to bring the rest of the world to its knees, she must break him and bind his soul to hers.

She does her job with brutal brilliance. Synn’s mind is broken and his soul is seared to hers in an unbreakable bond.

That doesn’t stop him from wanting to be free. She may have broken his mind and claimed his soul, but he will find a way to destroy her.

Experience a world of ships that sail the clouds and cites buried beneath the ocean, and survive the fiery battle brought forth by those who control the forces of nature!

Highland Song by Tanya Anne Crosby

This blog originally began as a personal account of my move from the US to the UK and my new life in a sometimes quite foreign place. I mainly write about art or gaming now, but I thought I’d tell you a bit about me.

We live in a sleepy English market town in Staffordshire. The market in the centre of town was chartered in 1207 and has run continuously since then. As am American I love that, although Phil forbids me to refer to anything as “quaint.” The first town we moved to when we came to the UK was famous for having sold its bible to buy a dancing bear, which is probably the coolest town history ever.

We live in a terrace/townhouse, a brick three-story house that is part of a long row of other houses. There are small Victorian cast iron fireplaces in most of the rooms, and the original fittings for the gas wall sconces are still in place in the rooms on the top floor. We have a kitchen that two people can’t comfortably stand in at the same time (cooking would have been done in the family room), a bathroom the size of a large-ish bedroom with a clawfooted tub which we have done up in a style I call Victorian Whorehouse, and two bedrooms on the top floor which we use as individual work rooms. Despite not having any storage at all (as an American used to huge closets and cupboards everywhere, this bothers me a lot), I love it.

This is my work room:

We share the house with three cats. We used to have three ferrets as well, but unfortunately they are no longer with us. For a while we also had two Gambian Rats (actually Emin’s rats, but no one has ever heard of those) which slept in a five-foot steel dog cage in the front room and screamed like parrots at night. The male, Anansi, came down with a mystery illness and we were unable to save him; we gave the female to someone who wanted to breed and had other giant rats for companionship. I’ll never buy an exotic animal again – our vets, while wonderful, had no idea what was wrong or how to cure it. So sad.

There are books everywhere in sagging bookshelves. The floors upstairs groan with the weight of the shelves and books. I think I could easily open a used bookstore with the books we have. When I was packing everything for the move to the UK the books were the toughest things to give up – I found homes for them with people who would love them, like finding adoptive parents. When you make a transatlantic move you basically have to give up everything except for treasured mementos and family pictures; it’s difficult, but in the end you discover how little of the junk we carry with us is actually important.

This is the first house I’ve ever owned, as we couldn’t have afforded one in the States. We went wild with decoration: the hallway ceiling is painted with sky and clouds, our Victorian whorehouse bathroom was very painstakingly rag-rolled with shades of crimson and scarlet, and the bedroom is a fuckoff shade of antique gold. It’s amazing to wake up to the sun blazing on the gold walls.

This is where I live. It’s not very posh, but I still am sometimes overcome by sheer amazement that I am actually here. For a girl from Northern California, living in the UK is like a dream. :)

It’s Monday, and I’m excited to have a new cover to show! This Mutant Life, edited by Ben Langdon. “This Mutant Life is a place for readers who enjoy speculative and neo-pulp fiction. It is for those who want to delve into the off-stage lives of superheroes, to see what the mutant existence would be like on a daily basis.”