Steven’s Evil Twin

Well, this is happening: ANOTHER "Saccharin Valley Twits" book. I thought I was done writing more books and was just going to continue re-reading my first 7 books and correcting any typos I missed. But, I’ve been writing like a maniac the last few days. So here we go again. (In my author bio for Polly Esther Rayon in the Saccharin Valley Twins books I keep saying I'll write a "proper" book someday... well, I am writing NON-Saccharin-Valley-Twits-horror-parody-mashups, with the characters I made up, in their own world, but there isn't a whole book finished yet. Just lots of parts of several different books in a series).

I keep re-reading (and defacing) SVT books and being like, "This could be a story. This could be a story. Just change this and insert Piper here. Bwahaha, etc." So this series could go on and on if I chose to keep writing (stupid) stories. I mean, several ghostwriters wrote over 100 SVT books. So yeah.

Anyway, the very obvious story idea is taken from #106, Breakfast of Enemies, where the twins star in a cereal commercial (completely forgetting that in Super Chiller #5, The Curse of the Ruby Necklace, they were already in a movie as extras. I guess that wasn't "canon" because it was a Super Chiller. Not that there's much continuity in SVT books anyway). So Steven wants to audition for a commercial too, but they’re only holding auditions for twins. So he goes out to find someone who looks like him. In the book it’s very stupid, but in my story, he finds exactly the right person. He gets all excited to audition but then the “twin” takes over his (dull, teenaged) life. Bwahahaha.  Steven's evil twin is played by Tobey, Piper's boyfriend. Piper herself is the commercial director, for the twins, and puts them through various embarrassing situations while they're filming. (Like making them dye their sun-streaked golden blonde hair RED. Jessica is horrified, LOL. And they can't refuse because they're under contract and getting paid oodles of money. Although, I just re-read the book after that, The Twins Hit Hollywood, and they did similar things when they were being bossed around by obnoxious actress Connie Boyer. Had their outfits changed, hair dyed brown, were made to wear brown contacts). Also, from the very beginning of my series, I had been calling the SVT cereal "Corny-Bobs" instead of Corny-Os. Just to change the name for parody, but I didn't really think it through. So now I've come up with my own branding/ slogans for "Corny-Bobs" cereal. I don't want my book to use too much of the same writing as SVT #106. That's just a jumping off point. So I'm changing as much of it as a can (obviously, so it's not plagiarism/ a rehash of the same book; I do that with all my books).

I also vaguely remember a Sweet Valley Kids book (back in the 90s, when you would physically go to bookstore and look at all the books) where Steven was jealous of the twins so he wanted to be a twin. The cover illustration was their nine year-old (? I think, since the twins were seven) brother next to cardboard cutout of himself. Which he wouldn't even be able to do back then, because getting a photo blown up and printed life-sized was expensive. LOL. That was just the cover, though, in the book I think he did try to get another boy to play his twin. And hilarity ensued, presumably. Or awkwardness.

So this plot is even more puerile if it's already been done in the younger series. BUT I have my characters, Piper the witch and Tobey the warlock.

It feels like the later books in the Sweet Valley Twins series got stupider. Not just the different cover art--like every book from, say, #87, on got progressively dumber, with ditzier twins and more rehashed plots. But, it may also be because that's when I stopped buying them new--like I "grew up" and decided I was too old for them (around age 13, after reading them for about 3 or 4 years). But then as an adult I went back to "collect them all" for reading and defacing. And making evil stories out of.

I have only like 65 pages. I need probably twice that for a proper book. And I have to figure out what to do about a cover. If I'm using GAN I have several images that could be Steven:

looking 17 instead of 14 (hard to make exact ages with GAN)...

looking serious with lopsided hair

your teeth and hair are stupid

too bland

too cute (but Jessica's friends think he's cute. I just think this is more like Todd or someone)

looking weird and pensive with one googly eye

I think I like the top one the best. On the SVT covers he always looked at least 25 years old when he was supposed to be only 14. And he only appeared a few times. I'll duplicate that GAN image and changed the expression slightly, if I can make him look "evil" using GAN. But the problem with generating portraits with GAN is that you only get like, a headshot. So I'd have to make it look like an actual photograph on the cover, like I did for The Twins and Their Rock Star-Witch Babysitter. Or it can be made to look like actual headshots, even though neither Steven or the twins have any since they're not professional actors. That can be one of those things where the cover presents the story information differently or is flat-out different than the actual story. I assume because James Mathewuse, who did the SVT covers, got only an outline of the story to work from, and made the cover illustration when the book hadn't been written yet, or something. 

I also ended up making some GAN images that I call "Demon Steven":

because he looks a little bit evil in all of these. This could be Tobias disguised as Steven, or something. I didn't make the eyes red on purpose. You can really only go between "blue" and "brown" (green eyes are somewhere in the middle) but if you tweak other settings sometimes the features go weird in various ways. I like making Black women with sparkly hair that's pink or purple or blue. (It doesn't work as well for women of other races, for whatever reason. And GAN is kind of racist, because artificial intelligence always is). Again, that's not in the settings--hair can only be Black or Brown or Blonde (red hair is a combination of those settings, you know I've been making oodles of ~**PIPER**~ with GAN)--but it happens because the GAN goes a little weird when you tweak multiple settings. It's really engrossing and mesmerizing. See here.