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.

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

Book 6 is live

OK, I tweaked Book 6 and republished it. Had some typos to fix because I finished it in a swift bout of mania. I just ordered an author copy of the paperback, for myself. (I had ordered 4 & 5 too, but they haven't come yet).
I also went back and added blog/FB author info to each Kindle edition. I should probably add the author bio. It's only in Book 6.

 

 

I finished Book 6

Well, I've had a lot of free time on my hands from my stupid forced work break (it happens every year) and not having a car because my car died and has been at the dealership getting repaired for a fucking month. I've mostly been focusing on finishing Saccharin Valley Twits. (both the writing and the illustrating). I had the 6 titles planned out and listed from the time I published the first book (6 years ago??) but I didn't have the stories really finished (to my liking, trying to find all the typos and mistakes) or the covers finalized.
Then yesterday (Or the day before... all the days blend together when you can't go to work and don't have a car, and when you can bum a ride, you have to run errands) I finished the last book - The Babysitter II. I actually thought it was pretty great. Funny, creative, weird, and a satisfying ending to the series (although I wasn't under any obligation to provide one, seeing as how Sweet Valley Twins spawned Unicorn Club and Sweet Valley Junior High and petered out around 1998).
Which was a big deal for me (the feeling good about it), since I usually am embarrassed about the things I write (especially these "evil stories".)
And I had the cover illustration for Book 6 pretty much done. Now I've got a template in Illustrator so all the elements of my SVT-book-parody cover layout are consistent from cover to cover.
So then I was like... have I gotten this thing (horror-parody of Sweet Valley Twins, using my own characters, a witch and her warlock boyfriend, tormenting the twins and occasionally their brother, as revenge for being sub-par reading for kids and taking so much of my time/ attention for all those years) out of my system??? Maybe. Piper and Tobias, years ago, broke away from SVT and started to occupy their own original stories. Or really, they existed in their own world first and then magically travelled to this parody of Sweet Valley.

I just haven't finished (again, to my liking) one whole book (non-Saccharin Valley Twits) that's good enough to (self-)publish.
But I kind of always thought I could continue this series (since I had oodles of ideas for messing with the twins [magically, that is], left over from all the stories I wrote as a teenager). I would just add the titles to that listing inside the front page (just like Sweet Valley Twins used to do).
Now I'm like, let's finish this, and publish it, and then from time to time re-read the paperback copies of my books in my continuing quest to make the text PERFECT, and re-publish them when necessary (printed books will hold the typos forever, but luckily not a whole lot of paperbacks have been sold - about 11 in the last 6 years - and the Kindle versions can be updated by the readers without them having to buy it again).
So, really, I suppose I'm done. I'll still continue to deface Sweet Valley Twins books, because that's a kind of art therapy. But I probably won't write any more "horror parodies." At least until the first 6 books gain momentum and become more widely known (which they may not, but I can dream).
I'll still write, but it won't be Sweet Valley Twins. It'll be asexual urban fantasy or whatever.
I really don't think anyone reads this blog (I should put a link in Kindle & paperback editions) but if you have been, thanks.

ETA [May 2021]: Haha this didn't happen; I keep writing them.

Books 4 & 5

I've got the covers finalized for Books 4 & 5 and I'm trying to publish them to KDP. Paperbacks should be soon, I was having issues with the spine text. And the Kindle versions are live, I think, but the formatting may be weird. Kindle keeps splitting my text in weird places (where I don't have a line break or a page break or a section break) so the title pages goes:

The Vampires --- (turn page)
A Saccharin Valley Twits-- (turn another page)
Evil Parody

Also, it didn't like my fonts or my dingbats, so in Book 4 there are two jpgs in the ebook that I hope are legible.

I also just finished Book 6 in a fit of mania. Now I'll go write proper books*.

*or not

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.