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. 

 

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.

Heavily Edited Book 1

I just re-published Book 1, The Babysitter, and hopefully I'm done messing with it. I started to think I should take out the demon parts (it says the babysitter is a witch, so if she later turns into a demon, well,  That Escalated Quickly) but then realized her occasionally being a demon might be mentioned in later books. Definitely in the latest Super Hideous Edition (that I haven't published yet). In all the other books, she's just a witch, but maybe the twins remember her being a demon... or at least, they remember her trying to kill them.

But I decided to make a different major change (spoilers ahead):

So, Piper turns into a demon to foil two would-be burglars of the Wastefeld house. She kills them by ripping their throats out (with her demon teeth). I suddenly realized this might be too violent for the age range I'm parodying (even though I warn about "magical violence" in my blurb and also, I say it isn't a kids book). This part of the plot needed to stay in for a later part to make sense. So I changed it so that she doesn't kill them, but they get scared and run away. There were deaths in the SVT books--I'm thinking specifically of in The Frightening Four when Eva Sullivan killed the gardener Mr. Brangwen... but that happened "off screen". So maybe the deaths here, front and center, would be incongruous. Or put people off. I don't know, I haven't had enough people read my books yet.

And then later a police officer shows up and asks the Wastefelds if they know anything about the burglaries... because the van the two guys were driving is just left on the street. That made sense if Piper killed the burglars, but not if they ran away (if they survived they'd want to drive home and leave no evidence of the attempted burglary). But, even if we as readers know that that makes them sloppy criminals, the twins and their brother don't. Because they don't know what happened that night with Piper and the attempted burglary. I couldn't take this part out either because the police officer (who is Tobias in disguise) is vital in helping them determine where to find Piper to defeat her for good. I decided that the universe had to level the playing field, because it's Saccharin Valley and Nothing Bad ever happens to the twins... at least not permanently. And in SVT books they were often able to "solve the mystery" very easily, so I'm making fun of that. If the babysitter was a witch, they'd still have to be able to defeat her.

I sold 17 paperbacks recently, so that's both exciting and terrifying. I want to thank the readers who purchased the paperbacks (because they're more expensive.) Maybe you're like me and sometimes want to hold a book in your hand. I hope you aren't disappointed. (Or maybe you read them on Kindle or Kindle Unlimited and liked them enough to buy the "real" ones).

Jessica the Witch Cover

This happened. I finished writing the book itself but it won't published until October at least. Got to let the last book sink in - don't want to be insane. 

That will mean that I am capable of putting out 3 books a year? Damn. As long as they're Saccharin Valley Twits, I mean. 

Not finalized, but this was fun. I like making GAN people on Artbreeder and tweaking vector graphics from Vecteezy in Illustrator. Also, 3-D rotating GAN images makes them pixelated? Boo.

Elizabeth (supposed to be) on the left, Jessica on the right with glowing eyes (which is my indication of "magic" on these). The new girl, "Zoe Hardwick" (Piper) is reflected in the black mirror/ onyx slab.

It's 191 pages, which is probably the longest Saccharin Valley Twits book I've ever written.

The Babysitter, new and improved

I went ahead and published the heavily edited/ revised version of The Babysitter. I managed to delete 8 pages' worth of stuff that didn't need to be in there. Including all the Piper POV parts and the first conversation between her and Tobey... they're just planning stuff, it doesn't matter and the twins are the stars of the show so there should be minimal stuff from my characters' point of view. I left in the demon parts. A few people have read my book since it was first published, so I didn't want it to be vastly different. But, I realized that if the first book is a mess then no one will stick around for the rest of the series. (If they're like me and want to read the books in order.) The first book sets up Piper's backstory and her reason for wanting to kill the twins. So I think re-publishing it would be better than doing a "special edition." I do have that new cover with the GAN images, though. But if I did that I'd want to update all the covers (the ones I did in Illustrator). I tweaked the cover of Book 1 slightly, cleaning up some stuff (Piper's hair, Steven's ear, and all the strokes in their features that are "uniform" are now tapered because that makes it softer/more like hand-drawn than computer-drawn). Then I ordered a paperback copy for myself, so I can read the revised version and check for typos (AGAIN). Although some parts I've read so many times that I'm not sure I would notice if there were any mistakes. On one page it said "then" instead of "than," for years and years before I caught it.

I just noticed that two paperbacks of The Babysitter were sold in April... so I'm still worried about people being mad if they have to buy it again. But, that would be if they were as obsessive as I am. Hopefully they knew what they were getting into with the paperbacks. Maybe they could buy the Kindle version of the updated book. As a kid/teen I was always noticing discrepancies between different editions of the same book (With a Wave of the Wand by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones are two that stand out in my mind) so I don't want people to be mad or wonder what's up with the edits. Hopefully I'm thinking about this way too much.

Also Amazon keeps wanting to put this book in a "books about babysitting" category which is clearly wrong LOL. I put the disclaimer on there ("this isn't a children's book") and everything.

Then I went back to looking at my new book that I might as well finish. 

first critical review of The Babysitter...

I just noticed I have another review on Goodreads... a two-star one. I was initially put off by the criticism but then I was like, Well, I don't disagree necessarily. The problem with the first book is that I was writing it for 16 years, starting when I was a teenager. So I agree that parts of it are clunky... although, the reviewer said tedious. Hmm. I wonder if it would be worth it to go back and tighten it up a little... more so than I already have, I mean. I've been correcting typos and occasionally deleting unnecessary sentences (for the last 7 years, because I can't just leave it alone), and then re-publishing (and then if you bought the Kindle edition you could Update it through your Amazon account. I hope people really do that instead of sitting around with a "wrong" book they don't like.) Maybe it would help to delete the first-person narration from Piper's point of view... SVT had something like that in The Frightening Four (it was third person, but from the villain's point of view). I found it super annoying. But, I wasn't really invested in Eva Sullivan as a character... I mean, she wanted to kill the twins, so she had that going for her. But her backstory was stupid and didn't make sense.

I wonder if the meta stuff was what got tedious... I just wanted to show off my encyclopedic knowledge of SVT. I always hated it when something happened in SVT that was similar to a previous book but didn't reference that book, like they pretended it never happened. I guess that was because their sixth-grade year went on forever, repeating various holidays.

Then she says, it's not terrible but it's not brilliantly written either. Does it need to be brilliant, to be an SVT parody? SVT was really inane at times. But yeah, I guess it does need to be brilliant to be worth your time. (I am the same way with books--there are so many I want to read and I don't have enough time to get to all of them so a book has to be really good  to keep my interest.) I remember reading a Harry Potter parody in the early 00s that I thought was tedious. I was like, does this need to exist? It was in the book store and everything, like some publisher said, "Let's cash in on this trend even if it sucks." SVT took up so much of my time as a kid/ adolescent, I'm getting my "revenge" by writing these books. My therapist says I'm working through some stuff, by doing this. LOL. I am, but I'm also writing these because they're "easy" and because in my mind, if they're parodies of SVT, the stakes aren't as high as if I was writing original content. (I am writing original content, I just don't think it's any good, and I don't have a whole book to publish at this point).

As for being too long, yeah, my other books are shorter and I hope that reviewer will try one (and find it to be better written!) The Kindle editions are pretty cheap, though. I guess as a reader I'm more inclined to buy a Kindle book (from an author I haven't read yet) if it's $0.99. But I don't think $2.99 is terribly expensive. I've wasted much money than that in my life on stupid things.

I'm still working on the latest book. I reached the point where it was a hot mess and didn't seem salvageable. But then I went back and planned out my plot a little and re-read some stuff that I had written that I liked, so... whatever.

Anyway, if anyone else read The Babysitter and liked it (or even if you didn't), could you leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads? Or just a rating. It's nifty to see people reading my books, and I appreciate the feedback. 

ETA: this review actually gives me an idea to revamp The Babysitter. I was going to release a "special edition" at some point with bonus content, which included the gallery of character images I made on ArtBreeder. The plot of the first book was always kind of convoluted, because Piper turns into a demon at one point. Since the summary says "the babysitter is a witch," that's like, "Well, that escalated quickly." Then there was unnecessary world-building/ rules of magic. SVT does have magic, as illustrated by several books where one or both of the twins makes a wish and it comes true. But witches and demons are kind of a stretch. So it goes off the rails a little and then returns to its parody origins at the end. I could take out the demon parts and re-publish, still with the gallery of characters. And make it $0.99 so if you already bought the book it would be discounted/ you wouldn't be buying it again at full price, but if you were reading the shorter version and liked it, you could then buy the "expanded world" version. 

Or maybe no one cares. I'll probably do this anyway since I am mostly publishing these books for myself and if anyone else likes them, that's an added bonus.