New IG page, new fans!

Very excited that I started an Instagram page (link at right) and got new followers (sometimes I'm old and forget that nobody reads blogs anymore)! People who are actually interested in reading my books! That makes me very excited. I started designing bookmarks, too, just for shits and giggles and then decided to get them printed at Vistaprint. I only ordered 15, tho, because I'm not sure how much demand there is. 

Now I have to make sure all my books are correct because people will be buying them (the paperbacks, I mean; the Kindle versions can be updated).

I mean, maybe.

Tweaked #4 Cover Illustration

 I also re-drew Jessica on the cover of Book 4, The Vampires Part 1. Now she looks more like Jessica on the cover of SVT #75... but turning in a vampire.

See here

Updated Cover Illustrations

I just tweaked the covers for #1-3 with some newfound Illustrator skills: using the blur effect for the shadows (to make the edges less harsh) and rendering the hair a little more realistically. They looked a little messy. I'm uploading them now. Elizabeth looks a little weird in Book 3, I may have to redraw her. 

 

Super Hideous Edition #3 is live

Super Hideous Edition #3 Jessica the Witch is now available in paperback and for kindle and has undergone its first round of typo corrections. I always order the paperback copy and then read it like a "real" book so I can catch things that I may have missed when it was a Pages file or a PDF. 

That is the longest book I've ever written. It was fun. I hope it makes sense. 

Also I'm working on a hardcover "special edition" of Book 1, The Babysitter. I added two pages of character galleries (GAN portraits from Artbreeder of my characters) and it has a new cover. There's one scene that I completely rewrote (see previous entries about "That escalated quickly"), I hope nobody minds. (If you were one of the people who ordered a paperback of the first book in April then it doesn't have the changes yet. I didn't want people to have to buy it again but I also couldn't leave it alone because it seemed clunky & terrible and I want my first book to make a good impression so people will want to read the others. Otherwise it's pointless.)

Then I went and looked at all my GAN images for each book and started doing character galleries for the other books. So those may be added to the paperbacks or I might do hardcovers of the other books at some point.

It is batshit that I have written 9 books. Although I should say "written" because they don't count as real books in my mind.

Heavily Edited Book 1

I just re-published Book 1, The Babysitter, and hopefully I'm done messing with it. I started to think I should take out the demon parts (it says the babysitter is a witch, so if she later turns into a demon, well,  That Escalated Quickly) but then realized her occasionally being a demon might be mentioned in later books. Definitely in the latest Super Hideous Edition (that I haven't published yet). In all the other books, she's just a witch, but maybe the twins remember her being a demon... or at least, they remember her trying to kill them.

But I decided to make a different major change (spoilers ahead):

So, Piper turns into a demon to foil two would-be burglars of the Wastefeld house. She kills them by ripping their throats out (with her demon teeth). I suddenly realized this might be too violent for the age range I'm parodying (even though I warn about "magical violence" in my blurb and also, I say it isn't a kids book). This part of the plot needed to stay in for a later part to make sense. So I changed it so that she doesn't kill them, but they get scared and run away. There were deaths in the SVT books--I'm thinking specifically of in The Frightening Four when Eva Sullivan killed the gardener Mr. Brangwen... but that happened "off screen". So maybe the deaths here, front and center, would be incongruous. Or put people off. I don't know, I haven't had enough people read my books yet.

And then later a police officer shows up and asks the Wastefelds if they know anything about the burglaries... because the van the two guys were driving is just left on the street. That made sense if Piper killed the burglars, but not if they ran away (if they survived they'd want to drive home and leave no evidence of the attempted burglary). But, even if we as readers know that that makes them sloppy criminals, the twins and their brother don't. Because they don't know what happened that night with Piper and the attempted burglary. I couldn't take this part out either because the police officer (who is Tobias in disguise) is vital in helping them determine where to find Piper to defeat her for good. I decided that the universe had to level the playing field, because it's Saccharin Valley and Nothing Bad ever happens to the twins... at least not permanently. And in SVT books they were often able to "solve the mystery" very easily, so I'm making fun of that. If the babysitter was a witch, they'd still have to be able to defeat her.

I sold 17 paperbacks recently, so that's both exciting and terrifying. I want to thank the readers who purchased the paperbacks (because they're more expensive.) Maybe you're like me and sometimes want to hold a book in your hand. I hope you aren't disappointed. (Or maybe you read them on Kindle or Kindle Unlimited and liked them enough to buy the "real" ones).

Jessica the Witch Cover

This happened. I finished writing the book itself but it won't published until October at least. Got to let the last book sink in - don't want to be insane. 

That will mean that I am capable of putting out 3 books a year? Damn. As long as they're Saccharin Valley Twits, I mean. 

Not finalized, but this was fun. I like making GAN people on Artbreeder and tweaking vector graphics from Vecteezy in Illustrator. Also, 3-D rotating GAN images makes them pixelated? Boo.

Elizabeth (supposed to be) on the left, Jessica on the right with glowing eyes (which is my indication of "magic" on these). The new girl, "Zoe Hardwick" (Piper) is reflected in the black mirror/ onyx slab.

It's 191 pages, which is probably the longest Saccharin Valley Twits book I've ever written.

The Babysitter, new and improved

I went ahead and published the heavily edited/ revised version of The Babysitter. I managed to delete 8 pages' worth of stuff that didn't need to be in there. Including all the Piper POV parts and the first conversation between her and Tobey... they're just planning stuff, it doesn't matter and the twins are the stars of the show so there should be minimal stuff from my characters' point of view. I left in the demon parts. A few people have read my book since it was first published, so I didn't want it to be vastly different. But, I realized that if the first book is a mess then no one will stick around for the rest of the series. (If they're like me and want to read the books in order.) The first book sets up Piper's backstory and her reason for wanting to kill the twins. So I think re-publishing it would be better than doing a "special edition." I do have that new cover with the GAN images, though. But if I did that I'd want to update all the covers (the ones I did in Illustrator). I tweaked the cover of Book 1 slightly, cleaning up some stuff (Piper's hair, Steven's ear, and all the strokes in their features that are "uniform" are now tapered because that makes it softer/more like hand-drawn than computer-drawn). Then I ordered a paperback copy for myself, so I can read the revised version and check for typos (AGAIN). Although some parts I've read so many times that I'm not sure I would notice if there were any mistakes. On one page it said "then" instead of "than," for years and years before I caught it.

I just noticed that two paperbacks of The Babysitter were sold in April... so I'm still worried about people being mad if they have to buy it again. But, that would be if they were as obsessive as I am. Hopefully they knew what they were getting into with the paperbacks. Maybe they could buy the Kindle version of the updated book. As a kid/teen I was always noticing discrepancies between different editions of the same book (With a Wave of the Wand by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones are two that stand out in my mind) so I don't want people to be mad or wonder what's up with the edits. Hopefully I'm thinking about this way too much.

Also Amazon keeps wanting to put this book in a "books about babysitting" category which is clearly wrong LOL. I put the disclaimer on there ("this isn't a children's book") and everything.

Then I went back to looking at my new book that I might as well finish.