Honest Titles for Sweet Valley Twins

I just thought of something new to blog about.
Like the "Honest Movie Trailers" on YouTube, here's the some titles of SVT books that are more accurate than the real ones.

1. Best Friends, Except When it Suits the Story for The Twins to Have a Falling Out, And They Always Make Up Neatly at the End
2. Elizabeth is Teacher's Pet, But Not Really, Because Jessica Just Wants All the Attention in Ballet Class
3. The House That's Not Haunted; It's Just an Excuse to be Shitty to the New Girl
4. Elizabeth's Best Friend Amy Wants to Be a Cheerleader Because She's Good at Gymnastics But the Unicorns Hate Her
5. Jessica is Terrible at Dog-Sitting, in Order to Go to A Rock Concert
6. Girls Who Seem Snobby and Mean are Really Just Having Trouble Dealing with Their Parents' Divorce

(will upload pix later)
Here's the real ones for now:

lolololol.
See Also: Paperback Paradise, who is not me, but is hilarious (s/he looks at the dopey vintage cover and writes a new title based on what s/he thinks it should be about)
Also maybe I should be on Twitter. (no don't make me)

Now publishing in Paperback through KDP

WOOT
OK now you can use the link at the right for both Kindle & PB

New Year, no new books.

I thought, what if I just went ahead and published Books #4 and 5? (Book 6 needs work). And if I continued the series, and wrote more books than just #1-6, I could re-publish those books with updated listings of all the books in the series inside, just like SVT did when they kept churning out new books in their series. But, no one cares, so why Supply when there isn't Demand? It's not Pottermore all up in here, alas.
Last night I re-read books 2 and 3 (found a couple minor typos STILL in Book 3), and thought they were Kicky Awesome. Probably because I'm ovulating and feeling good about myself. There were lots of newer bits that I had forgotten I'd added.
At some point I'm going to blog ideas for future books (Piper is the Count Olaf* of Saccharin Valley Twits: she can't kill them but won't stop trying, and won't ever go away), and maybe "Rejected Ideas For Evil Stories (see previous post)" that include the purple-prose semi-erotic fanfic-y stories I wrote when I was younger. That is what an author would do if her books were popular, which mine aren't (yet).
Also, on my KDP Sales Report, I saw there was a "Units Returned" (1). Aww, boo. But, that's only one out of however many people that have bought them. I hope it wasn't from formatting issues (on Kindle)!

In the meantime I keep posting pictures that show "Defaced SVT" on my FB page (Polly Esther Rayon).

*Super excited about the ASUE Netflix Series! Based on the casting I've already seen, it's going to be nifty. Entertainment Weekly graded it A-. They hated the new Oz-based series on NBC (Emerald City), though. I liked it, maybe. They had Tip and Mombi, so that was kicky. (From the second book, referring to Princess Ozma under a spell.)  And OLAFUR (Darri Olafsson) was one of the munchkins. I'm still re-reading the L. Frank Baum Books and Tarl Terlford's prequels. I also think movies could be made based on Danielle Paige's Dorothy Must Die series. Those were awesome and paid attention to the other Baum books (i e including characters like Jellia Jamb). In a way, my parodies are like that - taking characters that everyone supposedly loved (the Sweet Valley Twins) and subverting them - The Twins Must Die. (Bwaha).
ETA: Hey, I see a new 5-star review on GoodReads!! Thank you Carley Adair! That makes me happy

Elizabeth Through the Looking Glass

Haven't been here in awhile. Still waiting to see if Books #1-3 explode into popularity (yeah sure sparky) before publishing books #4-6, and technically #6 isn't quite finished.
I just saw Disney's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" and liked it, mostly. I mean, I will buy it when it comes out on DVD, because I have to Collect Them All, the Alice movies (except the 1950 Disney cartoon). But as an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Purist, I had some quibbles.
Neither movie followed its book counterpart closely (well, it wouldn't anyway, for a modern audience expecting Steampunk-y fantasy), just took ideas and characters and mashed them up. And "Alice in Wonderland" had elements from both books (ex. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are from the second book, as are the Red Queen and White Queen. And the Red Queen was an amalgam of The Queen of Hearts from Wonderland and the Red Queen from Looking Glass. I hate it when they do that - like Disney's animated version). But there was Time as a character in this movie, which was fun. (Time was mentioned in the first book, as a character who made it Tea Time all the time for the Mad Hatter and Co., after being insulted when the Mad Hatter sang at the Queen of Hearts' concert and was Murdering the Time). Sacha Baron Cohen was kicky like in "Sweeney Todd," this time, not insufferable, like "Borat". So Yay.
Also, visually stunning, yada yada, despite not being a Tim Burton film. And I loved that P!nk song, even though the music video was played before the movie as a very blatant product placement. (Now I'm getting into her music again, just like I did in the early noughts).
Anyway. What does this have to do with my books, Saccharin Valley Twits? Well (I have probably mentioned this before), Book 5 is based on Through the Looking Glass. (The book titles in my series are listed inside the first page, just like SVT. Don't Miss Any of the Books in This Hideous Series, haha).
Book 4 is The Vampires Part 1: Blood Moon, loosely based on SVT Super Chiller #9 (in that I borrowed the scene where the twins and their friends have a seance at their sleepover, which provides handy plot foreshadowing, and I appropriated the idea that there's "an old Luna place" in their neighborhood [only mentioned in SC #9, of course]. How many run-down/possibly haunted mansions are in Sweet Valley, anyway?? At the old Luna place there was a Handy Magical Old Person [actually, I think Corrina was young, or Mysteriously Ageless*] in the neighborhood to help Jessica, when Elizabeth turns "evil" (or becomes a normal surly teenager) with the mask that she found in a dog's mouth.  So I swapped out Corrina for another of my characters. If you're wondering, I don't plagiarize SVT; I re-appropriate. I just take bits from SVT from various books in the series and use them as jumping-off points to fuel my own plots/madness. And parody the series in general.) In this book, Piper appears as a "new student" yet again.
Spoiler, at the end of this book Jessica gets turned into a vampire and Elizabeth has to save her (of course). Being turned into a vampire is a temporary ailment in my writings, because these things never stick in the Sweet Valley Books (i.e. stuff happens in one book will never get mentioned again. It is like the measles, Joss Whedon; you do get over it. LOL). Piper the witch makes it harder for Elizabeth to save Jessica by having her vampire minion Fox take Jessica Through the Looking Glass into a magical land that poses a quest for Elizabeth, and that's Part 2 (Book 5). Piper essentially re-creates Looking-Glass Land for Elizabeth, using the twins' friends and family as counterparts of the characters (Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, etc.) while Jessica is holed up in a castle with her handsome vampire prince, being made to forget all about her sister (bwahahahaha!). It has to seem believable, not seem too easy, yet you know Elizabeth will save Jessica in the end because she always does and Jessica can't stay a vampire because she has to go to high school in SVH and get a tan and shit (although being a vampire would be a good way to remain a perfect-size-six).
And How Handy, I decided the twins had read Through the Looking Glass (and Dracula, for the vampire knowledge - actually they were reading that in SVT #88) in school, because that kind of thing always happened in the SVT series (see book #80, which I mentioned in my book The Babysitter). So Elizabeth had that to help her in her quest.
I have mostly finished writing this book, I just have to decide if I want more scenes inspired by chapters from Through the Looking Glass. Because there's one called The Lion and the Unicorn (in which the nursery-rhyme characters are fighting for the crown, and Alice serves plum cake backwards i.e. hand it around then cut it) and it seems fairly obvious that I would include that, being that Jessica's in a club called the Unicorns. At some point Lila Fowler, Jessica's rich friend, gets sucked in to the magical land too, and she might be the Unicorn. maybe. What I have written seems sufficient, though, and is funny at times. (not to toot my own horn, but as a person who most of the time thinks she is awful, it's sometimes good to have positive thoughts).
I guess stop talking about it and do it. Or, Hypothetical Reader of this Blog, you could comment on this entry if this is something you'd be interested in reading and then I will publish. It is all Fantasy-Horror-Classical Literature mashup, with parodies of Sweet Valley Twins. How very specific.

 

*also in the book Corrina was white (what a shock) but at age 13 I was picturing her as Black, like a "Magical Negro" trope. Because if you're going to have a stereotypical personal magically appear to help Jessica with the dumb curse, you might as well go all out. And have one other Black person in SV, for fuck's sake. Also maybe I was thinking of the movie "Corrina Corrina" with Whoopi Goldberg.

Saccharin Valley Twits Celebrate "Happy Same-Year-All-Over-Again"

I keep getting royalty payment notifications from KDP, just one or two here and there, and it's fun. I still want to see if Books 1-3 will explode into popularity (although doubtful) before I publish the next three. I might post future cover art on this here blog.

At this point I'm mostly focusing on my non-Sweet-Valley-Twins-parody books, the ones that have my character Piper but no Sweet Valley twits to terrorize (and are therefore not parody/ are original so as to not be mayhap messing with copyright laws). It's going rather badly. Saccharin Valley Twits was my training wheels, like it was OK to write these/ publish them because they were a humorous/horror-filled takeoff on an existing idea (also I was really good at mimicking the author/ghostwriter's style). Now it's all me, and I keep wondering why I'm trying to be a writer. (Technically I'm a writer already, but not really, because self-published doesn't count). I have a lot of chunks written that go in various books in the same series, but no one book is finished. Also I'm concerned for my ability to construct a plot/narrative longer than 100 pages (the standard size for SVT books). It has to be all "adult" too, can't be (making fun of) 90s-era middle-school books. As previously stated, I'm really bad at sex scenes, which seem to be a staple of urban fantasy; I can only titillate. Then it's like, YOU KNOW what happens after that, nudge nudge. Do I have to spell it out for you? Yes, apparently that's how allosexual people get their jollies. (I am asexual, and can be turned on by abstract things: color, pattern, texture, certain music. I have a libido, I just don't have sexual attraction to other people).
Hopefully if people liked my Saccharin Valley Twits books they would be interested in another (non-parody) series. I was always excited to find that one author's name was a pseudonym for an author I already read and liked.

Magna Edition #1: The Magic Christmas

Even though we already HAD a Christmas in Sweet Valley Twins' sixth grade (Super Chiller #1, which had 3 Christmas ghosts a la Dickens), we're having another one because this one is MAGIC. I wrote and drew in this book, like allllll my other SVT books. I will have scans of some pages of Copy 2 (yes, I defaced the book so much, I had to start a new copy... well I didn't HAVE to, but that's how I roll) added to this post at some point later.
Anyway. This one is the first MAGNA edition, which means more pages to read and delight or whatever. The Magna editions were all Christmas stories (except #100 which was technically also a Super Chiller), so there were two more Christmases after this, each plagiarizing a well-known movie ("It's a Wonderful Life" and "BIG," if ya wanna know).
In The Magic Christmas, the twins' grandparents give them each a (creepy) antique porcelain harlequin doll, which both turn out to be magic. Dolls are *really* princes of a magical land, under a curse. So the twins solve the riddle and follow them headlong to magic-land, to have their own magical adventure (and this was way before Harry Potter, so it was just a general fantasy pastiche). And the grandparents were in on this. They knew about the riddle and the curse. They were shopping for Christmas presents and thought, "Hey, let's give our granddaughters those HAUNTED antique dolls and plunge them into a dangerous adventure in a magical fantasy land." "OK." I mean, it's possible they thought the twins were too stupid to solve the magic riddle that opened the portal and turned the dolls back into princes. But, the twins had magical help from their riddle-solving dreams, aka plot device. (If they hadn't solved the riddle, they'd just go back to being mad at each other about their respective Christmas presents, without a handy Magical Land to make up in, and there'd be no plot).
And naturally, even when threatened with monsters and non-sexy evil sorcerers (evil sorcerers should always be sexy, but in a book for twelve-year-olds, he was just old and smelly with a long-ass beard; BOO), the twins, with the aid of their magical princes, managed to survive and not get magically maimed/ eaten by a bludrat/ devoured by a serpasaur.
Yeah, the author made up new names for magical beasts. Should've been clever, but I'm so over it. The mermaids were called "mermanons" and had scales up to their shoulders, because bare boobs were too risque, I guess. (I hated that kind of mermaid as a child. I thought Disney's "The Little Mermaid" and its seashell bras were Gospel). The basilisk was a serpasaur, etc. Except the unicorns were still called unicorns. WHUT. When I read this the first time at age twelve, I was like, how come they aren't called something weird, too, like "unithorins"? Answer: who knows. Or the writer got tired of making up shit.
Another thing: The princes have the same exact personalities as the twins, but the boy version. Dorin is thoughtful and considerate, and will make a good king. Adair is reckless and just wants to party/ go to war/ be a rash and thoughtless ruler. *BUT* each twin is paired with her opposite in personality. (For those keeping score at home: Jessica is paired with Dorin and Elizabeth with Adair. because the twins are separated for most of this adventure, each blindly following their doll-turned-prince into who-knows-what.) These pairings are because the author assumed that 12-year-olds would subscribe to the "opposites attract" deal, not having taken Psych 101 yet, to learn about The Matching Hypothesis. Yes, there's romance at 12. The twins each get a crush on their respective prince, but then they go back to Sweet Valley after the kingdom is saved and forget all about them. They are given the choice to stay in "The Hidden Kingdom" but choose to go back to dumb old Sweet Valley, of course. Even though the Hidden Kingdom has MAGIC. I would have stayed and gotten fat and lazy on magic, y'all. All the cool clothing and books I could conjure. (I am both twins, because I like both fashion and reading). OK not really.
Anyway, the main reason for mentioning this book on this blog is because it was the only SVT book with a real fantasy sequence. Like, it wasn't a (dumb/implausible) dream like Elizabeth's in The Class Trip. So, therefore, I could have my witch character Piper come visit Sweet Valley and wreak havoc and it wouldn't be much of a stretch. Keep this in mind when you read Book 1, The Babysitter.
(I couldn't have a sexy evil sorcerer, because in a book for middle schoolers, that isn't allowed.)

HEY LOOK A COMMENT

woot I have a comment on Goodreads

(that I am obsessing over)
I'm glad that line was appreciated even though I thought it was kind of clunky/ more "tell" than "show"/ not a proper joke...
..and then this reader apparently stopped at 77%? maybe because she thought it went really weird/ hated it? (Hello, Obsess-y.)
Well, then she gave it 3 stars. OK thx!