Another trope, another dollar

One of the things I do differently (from the real SVT Super Chillers) in my plots is that Elizabeth still has to bail her twin out, even when the events are supernatural. Like, in SVT, they must've decided that Elizabeth always bailed Jessica out/ tried to rescue her anyway, so let's switch it up and have Jessica, the irresponsible twin, have to save Elizabeth. This is prevalent in #3 The Carnival Ghost (Liz is controlled by evil ghost who makes her forget her twin... too bad it didn't take) and #9 Evil Elizabeth* (Liz wears a haunted mask that she found in a dog's mouth and it makes her more like Jessica, horrors! And since there can't be *two* Jessicas, Jessica has to save Elizabeth and make her be saintly again).
I guess it's more fun to have Jessica be the one haunted/ cursed/ whatever so I can point out that no matter how annoying Jessica becomes from this transformation, it's par for the course for Elizabeth. She will always want to save her bitchy annoying twin and make her "back to normal" even if "back to normal" is awful. Dolt.
So I pushed that even further by having Jessica be turned into a vampire. This happens in Books 4 and 5 (a two parter) which I haven't published yet. I re-read them recently and I really rather love them. They are humorous. But they deal with pubescent vampirism, so maybe that's weird. Like I took the sexiness out of vampirism completely (because I had to).
Also, all my books take place on Halloween, because that's the best time for spooky things to happen in books for 12-year-olds. Various SVT Super Chillers took place around Christmas (Super Chiller #1, #3), on Spring Break (#2, #6), and Mysterious Summer (before or after 6th grade? No One Knows)(Super Chiller #4, The Ghost in the Bell Tower, the one I've defaced the most and have 3 copies of, all defaced slightly differently)(Also Super Chiller #8, another camp story, even though there already was a camp story with Super Edition #3), and were not as scary. Like they weren't even trying.
Plus, having it always be Halloween is a comment on how many times they've had various holidays in this series, and how they've been going to 6th grade for 10 years. In fashion terms, they've gone from jumpsuits to Doc Martens. I usually pretend my books take place in the 90s rather than the late 80s because that's when I was reading SVT, mostly.

*Elizabeth didn't really turn evil - she didn't go on a killing spree or anything. She was just mean/ bitchy/ a punk.

Sweet Valley Tropes

My audience for these books is very specific: I am targeting women in their 30s who either liked or hated Sweet Valley Books in the mid-eigthties to mid-nineties. However, feel free to read them if you are:
-of any other gender
-that age but only vaguely aware of those books or
-a younger person (well, 13+) looking for a YA horror/ fantasy/humor mashup
and see how it goes. Although I do think you should have some familiarity with Sweet Valley to get the jokes. There were certain elements that were hallmarks of the series. These tropes include:

• Jessica & Elizabeth LOOK exactly alike but have different personalities. So different that their creator called them "the good and bad sides of one person". Which is kind of an insult to twins. You can write about twins and give them different personalities (and have them be interesting) without commenting on their morality. I guess that isn't EXCITING or EXTREME enough, so we ended up with one twin who was boring and condescending and the other twin was a sociopath. This is more prevalent in Sweet Valley High. In Sweet Valley Twins (where they are 12), these extreme personalities are toned down. But still, Jessica will do something awful to her twin and Elizabeth will smile and say, "I could never be mad at you!" (Ugh). Or she's mad but then they make up by the end of the book. How handy.
• The twins are the main characters and everyone LOVES them. In Sweet Valley Twins (*and Friends*) there's always some random person who is new to the school or goes to the school already and is being mentioned now, because either Elizabeth is trying to "help" them (the token charity case), or if they're deemed "interesting" enough to be bugged by the Unicorns (Jessica's snobby club), then that happens (either the person is famous or "cool" and the Unicorns fawn all over them, or they're a freak and therefore snubbed by the Unicorns, while simultaneously being befriended/ felt sorry for by Elizabeth.) (This trope comes in handy for inserting my character Piper into the story and having it still feel "real"/SVT.)
• When supernatural events happen (in the Super Chillers books), the books ends neatly with the twins defeating the ghost/ breaking the curse/ solving the mystery and coming out relatively unscathed in terms of both physical and emotional injury. Then future books pretend nothing happened. (They are Stand-Alone plots). In Sweet Valley High the danger factor was heightened and made more realistic since they were older (i.e. less hauntings and curses, more drug rings, kidnapping, attempted murder).
• The twins always have money to buy things they want (especially when the item in question is relevant to the plot), despite only being paid in 1980s 12-year-old's allowance (sometimes without even doing their chores! WHAT KIND OF BIZARRO WORLD IS THIS), or else Jessica wants a new purple sweater and makes her parents/Liz buy it for her. In Super Chiller #1, The Christmas Ghost (confusingly both a Christmas story and a ghost story - a la Dickens - PICK A THEME HERE), Elizabeth wants a carousel horse statue (??? why) and Jessica decides she likes it too, and wants ALL THE PRESENTS so she convinces their parents that only she wants it and Elizabeth didn't like it at all. Then 3 Ghosts magically appear to tell Jessica that she's being a bitch, just in time for Christmas morning, so she reforms (but it doesn't last, obviously, because future books pretend like nothing happened/ Jessica is "reset.").
• Endless sixth grade year, with multiple Halloweens, Christmases, Spring Breaks, and even summer (they never say whether it's the summer before sixth grade or the summer after, weird). Endless school projects too, usually just in time to coincide with something similar happening to the twins outside of school, for a free Learning Experience.
• When things get dull at Sweet Valley Middle School, a New Student (or Prince/Movie Star in Disguise) always comes to shake things up. Depending on who it is, all future books must incidentally mention that person so we remember they go to this school now. It helps if one of them is friends with Our Stars, the twins. Or if it's a Super Edition/ Super Chiller, then they never have to be mentioned again. (GOOD we didn't like you anyway)

More Tropes in future posts :-)