Saccharin Valley Twits and Fiends: a Sweet Valley Twins (Horror) Parody Series

I thought I should separate my regular blog from my book blog.
Here's everything you need to know about my first three books:
Like many women in their thirties, I read Sweet Valley books when I was younger. Didn't focus so much on Sweet Valley High (when the Californian, sun-streaked blond-haired, blue-green eyed, perfect-size-six twins were 16) as Sweet Valley Twins, the spin off for "intermediate readers" (this series was when the twins were 12 and in sixth grade... which was weird cos I was mostly 11 in sixth grade, but whatever). The first Sweet Valley Twins book I read was #53, The Slime That Ate Sweet Valley. Purchased from my 4th grade Troll Book Order (remember those?). #53 was also known as, "Mr. Bowman the English teacher takes teaching advice from his students, who are minors without a degree in education, as a plot device, so the sixth-grade class can make their own movie." With video (tape) cameras, natch, cos it took place in the early nineties. Not sure what kind of editing devices they used, since computers were mostly for nerds in these books.

I thought that one was pretty interesting (I was 10) so I decided to get more (I also have a vague memory of reading books 1-3 from my school library in third grade). Then it swiftly became COLLECT THEM ALL. (I was, and still am, "Collect Them All" with a lot of things). I distinctly remember buying a boxed set of the Super Chillers #1-4 from Borders at Waikele Center when I was 11. Along with the latest Super Chiller, #5 The Curse of the Ruby Necklace. I liked the scary ones slightly better. Or the ones where Jessica did something ridiculous and everyone went along with it (see book #46 where Jessica enters a contest illegally and instead of punishing her, her parents teach her a lesson in exaggeration by utterly embarrassing her, bwahaha). She got away with such shitty things. Elizabeth was her enabler. Even at age 12!
At some point I decided they needed to ridiculed, so I started writing and drawing in them. (Attempts have been made to convert all these "defaced" books - with their pages and pages of remarks and doodles in pens of various ink colors - into Post Modern Art. But that would require everyone who came to the gallery to sit and read the books, and be able to decipher my handwriting, and get all the jokes... Like Mystery Science Theater 3000, with books. Didn't really work, alas).
I didn't have ALL the books in the series until my twenties - by then the series was into the 100s, had degraded and vanished (last book published in 1998, probably), and I had already defaced most of the books I owned. I still haven't read a couple of the later ones (which didn't have the same pizzazz), but from #1-#90 (plus the Super Editions, Super Chillers and Magna Editions) I have read each of them, and written in them, up to ten times! I am somewhat of a maniac in that respect. Maybe I'll post some page scans on this blog, so you can see what I mean.
In my teens - late 90s - I started writing my own Sweet Valley Twins stories... but they weren't exactly fan fiction. In fact, almost the opposite - I call it "die die die fiction." As in, the Twins Must Pay for rotting my brain with terrible fluff all those years.
I created a character named Piper who was a witch (such things could exist in Sweet Valley at age 12, because their "Super Chillers" often dealt with ghosts and curses). Piper was out to GET the twins. Bwaha! But she never really succeeded in killing them. This was for two reasons:

1. The twins, being the main characters that everybody LOVED (despite all their flaws) could be put in danger, but they never suffered any physical harm - and more importantly, they never suffered any lasting psychological damage, no matter what scary things (ghosts, not pedophiles... well, except in Super Edition #6, The Twins Take Paris, which wasn't even a Super Chiller!! WHUT... go look at that, it really is a thing!!) they went through. This was so the series could go on and on and nothing would change (except the common-rotation of ghostwriters.)
2. Which brings me to my next point, I had way too many ideas for messing with the twins (at age twelve... so, messing with them in a supernatural way, not an inappropriate way, mind you) to confine to one story. Plus, if I made it a parody, it clearly had to be a series much like the original. Except the stories would ALL be scary (well, scary for 12-year-olds, nothing too extreme, just like the original.) And/or magical, because the ones with fantasy elements - like Magna Edition #1 The Magic Christmas - were also more interesting to me at age 12.

I named my town "Saccharin Valley" to clearly mark it as satire and so it wouldn't be copyright infringement. I changed the twins' names to Elizabeth and Jessica Wastefeld. (I also changed other characters' last names, haphazardly, as a comment on the ghostwriters sometimes mispelling/ misnaming characters. Like one time Tamara Chase was referred to as Tamara Powell, randomly. And Maria Slater was Maria Hughes??).
So, these are the first three books in the series. There will probably be three more. After that, it's beating a dead Unicorn (unless people really like them, then sure, I'll keep writing!).