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. 

 

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

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.

covers for Books 4 5 & 6!

OK I finished the covers for books 4-6. (After that, it's beating a dead Unicorn, but I have bits of other Evil Stories that I could do something with).

Here they are (with the aforementioned "in poor taste" Book 6)

I really love playing in Illustrator (I'm subscribing to the Creative Cloud now). And messing with stock vector graphics to make cute witches.

I also added footnotes to Book 1 so it notes every SVT book I reference:
#3, The Haunted House,
Super Chiller #7, The Haunted Burial Ground,
Super Chiller #9, Evil Elizabeth,
#97-100, The Frightening Four miniseries
#110, Pumpkin Fever
#54, The Big Party Weekend
#50, Jessica and the Secret Star
#80 The Gossip War
Super Chiller #1, The Christmas Ghost
Magna Edition #1, The Magic Christmas
Magna Edition #2, A Christmas Without Elizabeth
Magna Edition #3, BIG for Christmas
 #78, Steven the Zombie
#15, The Older Boy
#42, Jessica’s Secret
Super Chiller #4, The Ghost in the Belltower
Books #97-100, The Frightening Four miniseries
#64, The Charm School Mystery

daaaamn. (I did my homework! unlike some of the ghostwriters)

New Paperback covers coming soon

I just spent the weekend working in Illustrator to clean up my cover illustrations. I improved them, although you maybe can't tell unless you're looking at them side by side. Uploading them to Amazon KDP so the paperbacks will be available in 72 hours. Then I'm going to publish Book 4, and maybe Book 5 too. I finished cover illustrations for those earlier but I needed to finalize the text.
Behold:

For book 1 I added the "Sunny Spanish-tiled kitchen" that is always mentioned. Book 2 pretty much the same, that background was a quick clip-art thing with a filter. Book 3 I fixed the curtain/ background and cleaned up the light on "Lady Ostara"'s hands. And the crystal ball stand. (Sorry if you have an older paperback copy with the messiness.)
I've been really motivated lately.