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.

Jessica the Witch GAN

It's fun to make GAN images of the characters I've created.

In the upcoming book, Piper plays Zoe Hardwick, new student at Saccharin Valley Middle School. (Side note, how many "new students" have there been in SVT? Actual ones, not ones I made up. At least ten*). She's of mixed race this time. (Because the last thing Saccharin Valley needs is more white characters).

(in the book I describe her as having "zillions of freckles," but I can't do freckles in GAN...maybe in GIMP. Also she has glasses but adding glasses in GAN often goes a little weird.)
 

She also plays an elderly shopkeeper (for the new magic/Wicca/metaphysical store in Saccharin Valley). Who is kind of a punk. She has pink hair. And silver eyes, which I just stuck in there for shits and giggles (usually Piper's eyes give away the ruse, they're glowing green most of the time) but then I got the GAN to look like that, by accident. Her name is Cerridwen O'Connell.

She will serve as the Wise Old Person one of the twins seeks out for help. (See: Corrina in Super Chiller #9, although she wasn't old... but that kind of trope). Piper plays more than one character (much like the last book, and the one before it) because she is more powerful than Tobias, so her magic can sustain both disguises. (No one really cares about these things, but I think about them because I like making up shit/character development/world building).

Tobias plays her husband, Harlan O'Connell (he uses that alias a lot in my books, because in my mind he's not as excited about being in disguise as Piper is, and if the twins don't remember him because it's a different book, then it doesn't matter). He kind of aging hippie. 

"That's so right on, man." He's kind of a sleaze here, I may have to tweak him more.

Neither of them have been "old" yet. I guess because when I needed an old witch and and an old evil sorcerer for Book 2, I used Piper's "real" (outside of Saccharin Valley stories) grandparents. Oh, Tobias was the Magistrate in old Salem in The Babysitter II. So, this guy is seemingly a little less stern and more friendly and laid back.** And Piper was kind of old, briefly, in Book 6, The Babysitter II. She was "Faith Green", essentially May Brown from SVT #54 but a WITCH (obvs). Faith Green was middle-aged. I made a GAN portrait for her too. I want to be able to include these in my paperback books... they would have to be desaturated (to publish in black and white. Kindle versions can be color?). Maybe as chapter headers instead of a Gallery in the back, which is what I'm trying to do in The Babysitter (like a special edition).

I sometimes wonder if people actually read my books, if they have a preference as to how the twins are "terrorized." Like just Piper & Tobias messing with the twins, or Demon Piper? Or along with the vampires I made up? (I just realized there are 4 vampires, that seems excessive now, LOL. Lydia, Fox, Lucia & Vesper***). At some point I was like, don't create any new characters; just Piper is fine. But then Tobias, her boyfriend gets sucked into it. Mostly because he likes watching Piper work, not because he particularly has a jones for fucking up the twins' (and occasionally their brother's) lives. He treats it like his girlfriend's amusing hobby, and he's just hangin' out.

And also, are you here for the imitation SVT, or the "DIE DIE DIE" situation? Or the humor, which I hope is funny. Sometimes I write things and LQTM.**** (And sometimes I write things that I think are funny, and then go back and read them and they seem forced/ cringeworthy.)

I probably won't use all of these for the cover, I may just have Zoe and the twins (Elizabeth looking scared/ concerned as seen below, Jessica looking witchy if I can swing it.)

*Nora, who everyone made fun of, Brooke, who everyone thought was a snob, Arthur, who turned out to be a prince, Maria, who was a child actor in Hollywood before SV, Brian Boyd, who brought white supremacy to SVMS (or he was just a prick)... now I want to go look at all my SVT books and add more. Kala the Native American, but that was a Super Chiller.

**He's still a STRANGE MAN but as we've seen in SVT books, the twins encounter strange men quite often and are somehow never in any danger.

***BTW, Lucia and Vesper are lesbian lovers but that sort of thing isn't mentioned in Saccharin Valley

****"Laugh Quietly to Myself" a la Demetri Martin

More Demon Piper

 I keep making these

Piper with fangs (because it's fun, not because she's a vampire...) and liquidy no-pupil eyes

Demon Piper 4 (latest and favorite)

Demon Piper "Yaw" (in Artbreeder the YAW is movement from side to side, so this is a 3/4 view of Demon Piper's face).

Yeah, that's fun. I got my new copies of books 1 and 6 but I have found things I wanted to correct SINCE then. Ugh. I have 23 "wrong" copies of paperbacks. I'm still waiting for book 7 (the paperback copy I ordered, to come). I want to read it proper, as a book. I haven't read it since I finished it & published it. 

ETA: I got it a few days ago and read it and it was nifty except I found a couple of words I want to change and there's a conversation between Amy and Elizabeth that doesn't make sense because it's just the dialogue without "Amy said" or "Elizabeth said" and it goes back and forth so you should be able to tell who's talking but it goes Amy, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, instead of Amy, Elizabeth, Amy, Elizabeth. (Although real SVT books occasionally had issues like that, because they were such a rush job, being published every month)

ETA: I just fixed the problems with the "book content" and uploaded them to KDP. Also, here's if you want to look at my Artbreeder people

More faces

 

Apparently I published this to the wrong blog >:-P

I  keep rendering photorealistic portraits of my characters, using GAN (on Artbreeder) and GIMP (free software similar to photoshop). Here are some more faces:

 another demon Piper, from Book 1 The Babysitter

 

from Book 2 The Witch, "Fallon Morrison" (Piper disguised as a 12-year old), and in her "witch makeup"

 

witchy Fallon, in costume 

 

 

from Book 2 The Witch,  Fallon's grandmother Brighid, normal and in witch guise

 

 

another version of Brighid

 

 

from Book 2 The Witch, Fallon's "cousin" Craig, which is Tobias in disguise... who is a demon 

 

 

 from Book 3 The Fortune Teller, Piper as Lady Ostara and Tobias as her assistant Harlan O'Connell (who stole his look from Spike from Buffy, clearly). Lady Ostara has a light radiating from her third eye because she's a fortune teller and a psychic, tee hee. I gave her makeup in GIMP. Still working on that. The Blur tool is your friend. Also layer masks. Also different brushes, ones that mimic a pencil or crayon.

 

Book 7 (aka Super Hideous Edition #1) is live

I finished The Twins and Their Rock-Star Babysitter, read it 15 more times, and published it. So now there's a Kindle version  (which didn't like my dingbats so the clover at every chapter heading is showing up as an "A" 😠) and a paperback version with my spiffy GAN-and-vector-graphics cover.

buy Kindle or paperback book here

I ordered a copy of the paperback and I will read it AGAIN and check for any typos. (To correct and re-publish. If you buy the Kindle edition and I later correct mistakes, you can update your copy by going to your Digital Content on Amazon and click "check for updates" and then "update" and it will fix them).

Also, I just noticed in Book 5 I didn't turn off the hyphenation in the paragraph styles. Hopefully won't detract from the reading experience. I am obsessive about formatting, or at least about things that annoy me as a reader.

here's a chart a made of character in Book 7 (I love playing with GAN so I made all the main characters including ones that are Piper or Tobias in disguise).

Piper looks slightly different as Maeve - she is described as having copper hair and grey eyes (Piper has green eyes and ruby-red hair). Tobias first appears as Mr. Riordan, the rock star's agent. I kept picturing that character as a young Greg Proops (because he's nifty, Kittens McTavish*) so I tried to tweak the GAN as much as possible to make him Proops-y. I guess I could've uploaded an actual photo of him and used that but I feel weird doing that. Even though it's not uploading a photo, because the GAN "reads" the photo and gives you an approximation that you can then tweak. (I was going to do that with Fallon's grandfather in Book 2, because in my mind he looks like Creed Bratton... as an evil sorcerer).

 OH, another thing I did was make Saccharin Valley Twits a "series" on KDP. So it's official ("It's official... I can't have children" ~Debbie Downer, LOL)

* and also because I occasionally insert Whose Line honeys into my stories, because instead of making up a character's features to describe, I describe a person who already exists

Creating visual representations of characters 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