The Twins and Their Rock-Star Witch Babysitter

I added Piper's amethyst necklace (that she wears to transform into rock star Maeve) to the cover. (It's not exactly how I pictured it, but the best I could do working with vector graphics)

Now I just have to finish writing the damn story. I need a good ending.

ETA: here's the final cover:

Also, have you ever seen these "alternate" SVT covers? I see them on eBay sometimes. They look like vanitas. Weird. (They never looked like that when I was buying them in the 90s). My latest cover was inspired by those, I guess.

See:

 

Book 1 Cover re-do

Just pooping around... Not sure if I like this. Also, can't get Steven to look right. And Piper isn't wearing her Goth makeup, because that is difficult for me to Photoshop (and by that I mean use GIMP).

OR how about this: 

the background is supposed to be Piper's spellbook

ETA: here's a slightly better scared/ worried Steven:

The "photo frames" deal makes for clunky graphic design, but I can only use Artbreeder to make "headshot"-type portraits.

cover for Book 7/ Super Hideous Edition

 So, this happened. Not sure what I'm going to do for the cover illustration. I really want to use the GAN-generated portraits.

ETA: Ok how about this:

 

(if I re-do all the covers I'll have to pretend the GAN portraits are all polaroids, otherwise I'd have to Photoshop in some shoulders/ rest of their bodies)

MOAR PIPERs

 All the Pipers. I made her up, and now she's real.

Glowy eyes and windswept hair (fittingly, upped the "chaos" on this)

tiny fangs

slightly middle-Eastern (or what GAN thinks is Middle Eastern... too white really but with larger eyes)

more photorealistic with weird computer-generated earrings

grinning

glowy eyes

huge (evil) grin

slightly darker "photo" with teeth bared

photorealistic 2, with blobby earrings

 

other Artbreeder portraits of characters

I posted some of these on Facebook.

Here are the twins (Elizabeth and Jessica Wastefeld):

I need to Photoshop their eyes more "blue-green, the color of the Pacific Ocean" and see if I can make a dimple. Also, it's difficult to change just the hairstyle on a face. You end up slightly altering all the features.

Some "scared" versions of the twins:

and here's some different versions of Steven. The first good one I had was a kind of illustrated style instead of photo-realistic, so it didn't "match". (Using the "art" slider to make it more photorealistic sometimes turns into what looks to be a different guy.)

 

 

And here's "Fallon Morrison" aka Piper from book 2 The Witch. (It's difficult to make people look a certain age, like *exactly 12*, you have an age slider and you have to eyeball it.)

 

Here is in her Halloween witch makeup, which scares Elizabeth and Amy and grosses out the Unicorns (did this in GIMP):

 

And here's some "Amy Sputter" (Amy Sutton in SVT) and "Maria Sleeter" (Maria Slater in SVT):

And Lila Fouler (Fowler in SVT):

 

Oh, and Tobias. So, in the Babysitter he looks 16-17 (to match Piper's apparent age, even though in "real life" - when they're not terrorizing insipid twins - they are adults). The first few "good" ones I made looked like Tobias but were that painted/illustrative style that didn't match the others. And converting it to a "photograph" made him look different/not like Tobias.

updates during pandemic boredom

Not that I necessarily have any more free time. Since the pandemic started, and the subsequent shitty response by the US government, I don't go out much any more. I go to work 2-3 days a week, and work from home the other days. I go out shopping mostly to buy groceries, although I'm broken that rule several times. (Because sometimes shopping for things gives me an emotional lift, but obviously I always wear a mask). Now I'm like, for real now, buy "fun" things online and only go out for groceries. Because this isn't going away any time soon.

So, anyway, I'm going to end up republishing book 1, The Babysitter, because I noticed a discrepancy in the way Tobias is referred to. He introduces himself as Tobey to the twins, so they should call him Tobey. But Piper calls him Tobias, for reasons I explored in other, non-SVT horror parody stories (that haven't been published, because I haven't finished a whole book yet, just many, many chunks of many, many books, and short stories). There were times when Jessica or Elizabeth said Tobias, so that's wrong. As always, you can update the Kindle edition once you've bought it, but paperbacks will have to be re-ordered (in order to have a more "correct" copy). I sometimes think about all the paperback editions that have been published since 2014 that have mistakes/ typos in them, and cringe. Sorry, paperback lovers. I always order a new edition for myself because it's still so nifty to publish my own books.

So I changed that to be consistent, and since Tobias's alter ego in the new book (well one of them, as he plays Maeve the Rock Star's agent, guitar player in her band, and the twins' handsome new substitute teacher) is named Craig Riordan, I changed the name of Fallon Morrison's demon "cousin"* in Book 2 The Witch, to match. He was previously called Craig Ross, and I don't like that name anymore. Also the name "Craig" is suitable for this "Super Hideous Edition" (The Twins and Their Rock-Star Witch Babysitter - which is a parody name of SVT #55, Brooke and her Rock-Star Mom) because it means "rock" LOL. (As in, a craggy rock, not rock music).

I've been working on the Super Hideous Edition a lot lately. Maybe because it keeps me sane in these hideous times. (I shouldn't complain obviously, because I'm white, I can still afford rent and food, and I have health insurance. Many US citizens are not so lucky.)

So, maybe that'll get published at some point. I need to do a cover illustration and determine the number of pages. The cover will probably be sea foam green. (SVT had lighter covers for Super Editions, and darker covers for Super Chillers. And the Magna Editions were all Christmas-y).

*only not really, obviously, because incest, but the twins don't know that 12-year-old Fallon is really 17-year-old witch Piper, and twentysomething Craig is really 16-year-old Tobias, and that they're lovers (and not related). Because that's all part of Piper's plan.

Super Hideous Edition: The Twins and their Rock-Star Witch Babysitter

I had a scrap of a story that didn't go in any other books. It's taking part of SVT #55, Brooke and Her Rock-Star Mom, and making the Rock Star into Piper. (And she's not Brooke's mom. Haha. Still a witch trying to kill the twins [and knowing she can't, settling for tormenting them]).

I kept working on it until I had like half a new book, but then it became a hot mess. If I finish it and publish it, it will be a Super Hideous Edition. You know how, in SVT, there was the main series, books 1-118, and then there were Super Editions ("more pages, more fun"), and Super Chillers (scary, mostly ghost stories) and Magna Editions (even more pages and always Christmas, so they had like six different Christmases in the same year)?

It'll be like that. Outside the main plotline, "special" edition. Although there's really no continuity in my series so it probably doesn't matter. (And Book #1 The Babysitter says it's a "Super Chiller"; they all are technically.)

Anyway, instead of "Coco", Brooke's mom, the seemingly-French hot new rock star, Piper is Maeve, and she's seemingly Irish. (I know, everyone is super WHITE in my books, but that's how SVT was, and it was stupid/wrong, so I'm commenting on that [hopefully it's understood that I'm commenting on that and not perpetuating racism). So I suppose her music has a kind of Celtic influence. It doesn't matter how weird her music is, though, because all the kids at Saccharin Valley Middle School LOVE it. Why, because the new songs are a spell, a kind of hypnotic siren song. It mesmerizes everyone and naturally Elizabeth has a "funny feeling" while Jessica just goes batshit fangirl for the new rock star. (Instead of "Coco Crazy" it's "Maeve Mania", tee hee.) Tobias appears as her agent but also the guitar player in her band. The rest of her band are probably going to be the other characters VLC and I made up: Fox and Lydia, the vampires; and Lucia and Vesper. Although they're in the periphery of the story. It's mostly Piper and Tobias perpetrating the cool-new-rock-star evil spell.

So, that's a thing. I might start a cover illustration for this.

Creating visual representations of character with GAN, woot.

So I just discovered Artbreeder.com and set about making a Piper. Prior to this, I was only able to:

a) draw Piper (with pen in the many, many SVT books I defaced)

b) make silly computer art with Microsoft Paint and modified clipart from Corel software (it was the late 90s/early 00s)

c) use Illustrator to make James Mathewuse-esque cover illustrations that included Piper (in which I would take an illustration of another character looking sly or angry from the cover of an SVT book, and modify it to be Piper), and 

d) collect various photos on Pinterest for inspiration.

But now, I can MAKE PEOPLE. As in, computer-generated realistic portraits. These people don't exist, but they sure look like they do (or at least, just their head). I love GAN (Generalized Adversarial Network - that's what the machine learning/AI is called that can generate these portraits). So I set about making representations of the twins that matched the cover illustrations of SVT/ how I imagined them. Ditto for Steven. And Piper, and Tobias...

Naturally I got too involved making Piper. She's my red-headed witch honey. (Yeah I know there are OODLES of red-haired witches already in popular culture, but dammit, I invented her in 1994 and there isn't a TV/movie version of Sweet Valley Twins. Sweet Valley High, yeah, with Todd and Bruce looking 30 [well, much like the book cover illustrations, haha] and there definitely wasn't a horror parody of Sweet Valley Twins. So first she exists here in Sweet Valley [Saccharin Valley] where everyone's suspiciously WHITE and whatnot. And where there were no witches, previously. Then when she's in her own story, she's hopefully slightly different than all those other red-headed witch characters.)

Here's some Pipers.

I like the first and last ones; I just need to take it into Photoshop (which is only on my old Macbook, grrr**) and make her eyes greener and add Goth earrings and her spiked choker. Then I could do the witchy version from The Babysitter (glowing yellow eyes and witchy teeth - and the shiny silver triangle on her forehead that I stole from The Headless Cupid*). But demon witch Piper will be trickier. I have been trying to render that in Illustrator, it never looked quite right. If I find a photo of proper demonic prosthetic makeup I can maybe crossbreed it with this. Or, play around with Blender?? TurboSquid?? I don't know; I'm old. One of them is super expensive. I think Zbrush. or Maya. Blender is free but then you subscribe to their cloud. Unless I'm confusing that with something else. 3D rendering would be awesome; I don't necessarily need animation. Unless I want to make movies of my stories. How would I even do that (also, probably still worry about copyright infringement even tho it's supposed to be horror-parody). 

Yeah, now I'm trying to learn Blender. You can get 3D models (your "base mesh") for free online, and take them into Blender and tweak them. But I want to take my 2D portraits from Artbreeder and make them 3D in Blender, and don't know how.

*occasionally I get embarrassed by that part and want to take it out, but it's kind of a nod to by 15-year-old self.

**I just found GIMP which I can use instead, woot