Well, I've had a lot of free time on my hands from my stupid forced work break (it happens every year) and not having a car because my car died and has been at the dealership getting repaired for a fucking
month. I've mostly been focusing on finishing Saccharin Valley Twits. (both the writing and the illustrating). I had the 6 titles planned out and listed from the time I published the first book (6 years ago??) but I didn't have the stories really finished (to my liking, trying to find all the typos and mistakes) or the covers finalized.
Then yesterday (Or the day before... all the days blend together when you can't go to work and don't have a car, and when you can bum a ride, you have to run errands) I finished the last book - The Babysitter II. I actually thought it was pretty great. Funny, creative, weird, and a satisfying ending to the series (although I wasn't under any obligation to provide one, seeing as how Sweet Valley Twins spawned Unicorn Club and Sweet Valley Junior High and petered out around 1998).
Which was a big deal for me (the feeling good about it), since I usually am embarrassed about the things I write (especially these
"evil stories".)
And I had the cover illustration for Book 6 pretty much done. Now I've got a template in Illustrator so all the elements of my SVT-book-parody cover layout are consistent from cover to cover.
So then I was like... have I gotten this thing (horror-parody of Sweet Valley Twins, using my own characters, a witch and her warlock boyfriend, tormenting the twins and occasionally their brother, as revenge for being sub-par reading for kids and taking so much of my time/ attention for all those years) out of my system??? Maybe. Piper and Tobias, years ago, broke away from SVT and started to occupy their own original stories. Or really, they existed in their own world first and then magically travelled to this parody of Sweet Valley.
I just haven't finished (again, to my liking) one whole book (non-Saccharin Valley Twits) that's good enough to (self-)publish.
But I kind of always thought I could continue this series (since I had oodles of ideas for messing with the twins [magically, that is], left over from all the stories I wrote as a teenager). I would just add the titles to that listing inside the front page (just like Sweet Valley Twins used to do).
Now I'm like, let's finish this, and publish it, and then from time to time re-read the paperback copies of my books in my continuing quest to make the text PERFECT, and re-publish them when necessary (printed books will hold the typos forever, but luckily not a whole lot of paperbacks have been sold - about 11 in the last 6 years - and the Kindle versions can be updated by the readers without them having to buy it again).
So, really, I suppose I'm done. I'll still continue to deface Sweet Valley Twins books, because that's a kind of art therapy. But I probably won't write any more "horror parodies." At least until the first 6 books gain momentum and become more widely known (which they may not, but I can dream).
I'll still write, but it won't be Sweet Valley Twins. It'll be asexual urban fantasy or whatever.
I really don't think anyone reads this blog (I should put a link in Kindle & paperback editions) but if you have been, thanks.
ETA [May 2021]: Haha this didn't happen; I keep writing them.
