Hi!  It’s me!  The creator!

I thought I’d give y’all a bit of a behind the scenes tour of how this story is developed, why it came to be, and what writing it is like on a day to day basis.

At first, I created Lily with the intention of making her a vtuber.  I played around with different streaming technologies, worked on creating an avatar, even poked around different voice changing software.  After a little while, I decided to put that on the back burner.  It’s still something I might do, but it seemed like there was too steep of a learning curve and I wasn’t confident I could pull it off.

So instead, I created a website that was supposed to be her virtual presence, and her diary was really supposed to just be an exposition that would tie into any future streaming, or monetization, or whatever.

But that plan kind of went awry.

I found as I continued to write her, she kind of took on a life of her own.  Very soon after starting to write her diary, I showed it to a friend of mine, and she started to show it to her eight year old daughter.  It was a HIT.  Her daughter loves Lily.  That was a really good indication I was doing something right, but it wasn’t what I intended it to be.  at this stage, you can probably see the tone of the story slightly shift as I started to become conscious of the example Lily was setting for my friend’s daughter.  She became a little more mature, a little less flighty, but kept that, I don’t know, Liliness that made her such a joy to write.

My friend’s daughter is the inspiration for Allison, by the way.  Thus I can’t really provide any further details.  Nor do I want to.

As the story continued, I found it a little difficult to get into a rhythm of updating.  At one point I kept about a week’s backlog, and it took me a while to come up to speed.  One of the beauties of using the platform I do is that I can backdate posts and pretend that they were on time, but we all know they weren’t.

I think I started to take it more seriously at about the same time I conceived of the “vacation” storyline.  That’s also when I realized that I had kind of backed myself into a corner.  I needed to explore some things that a girl Lily’s age would explore, but I couldn’t do it and keep the site safe for my friend’s daughter.  So, after some thought, I created the Patreon account.  That was designed specifically and only (at least at the time of its creation) to block off PG13 content from the eyes of my friend’s daughter.  But it opened up some other opportunities as well, and I haven’t yet fully explored that.

Right now, I tend to write posts one day in advance.  I will write the framework of the post, save it as a draft, then set it aside for a few hours and mull on it.  Then I’ll reopen the post and fill in details I’ve thought of in the intervening hours.  When it’s ready to go, I’ll set it to run at the appropriate time, and then move on to the next day.  That pattern seems to work pretty well for me, and it is close enough to the actual release date to allow me to account for any pressing current events.

I have been running some Facebook ads to try to at least get the word out.  While I’ve had to pay very little out of my pocket (FB has generously offered me some ad credits I was able to use) they’re singularly unsuccessful in any meaningful way.  I think this could be a really cool thing – if I can get the word out to people who might like her.  There have been about 2,000 impressions right now and nearly zero engagement.  Oh well.

I hope eventually people find Lily and fall in love with her like my friend’s daughter did.  Everyone who reads Lily, at least all the way through, seems to love her, and get very, very invested in how the story progresses.  That’s the mark of a good story.  But it means nothing if no one reads it.  Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for reading.  I hope you like these little behind the scenes insights.  Maybe someday I’ll move them behind Patreon, but for right now, they stay free.  Toodles!