Hi!  It’s me!  The creator!!!

So things have been kind of active in Lilyworld.  Story wise, she’s in Columbus right now spending time with Jack and his family!!!  I don’t know if anything momentous will happen while there, but I don’t have anything really huge planned right now.  She’ll just have a fun time!!!  It might move the story forward a bit, but it just seemed like the right thing to do.

But the more interesting stuff right now is behind the scenes.  I’ve been getting a little better at doing the YouTube thing.  It’s not the easiest thing, honestly.  I’m trying to figure out what I can do that is true to the character, fun and believable for the viewer, and that I’m comfortable with.  A few things, believe it or not, I’m not comfortable with.  I tried twitch streaming, and that almost made me panicky for some reason.  I just couldn’t get into it like I can with her vlogs.  So that’s out for now unless I can find a good reason to make the effort.  I also am trying to keep a pretty strong boundary between when I’m playing Lily (acting) and when I’m not, though I do find that a little bit of Lily’s mannerisms sneak through, I think I’ve got that in hand.

I think a part of it is that I’m not a gamer, and Lily really isn’t either.  Trying to fit into the twitch game-streaming mode just doesn’t work.  It’s not a good fit for either of us.  If Lily was a gamer maybe I’d try to make it work for the sake of the character, but there’s no use forcing it.

One of the most difficult things, though, is the current events in the world that are going on.  How do I handle that with Lily?  Does she address it head-on?  Obliquely?  At all?  I think I’ve settled on something between obliquely and not at all.  Ultimately, the calculation is this:  Lily is supposed to be a fun story, and she’s supposed to be a somewhat innocent sixteen year old girl whose biggest concern is which dress to wear on any given day.  Of course it’s a little more involved than that, but that’s the general vibe I’m aiming for.  A fun escape.  I can’t do that if she’s fretting about Russia and Ukraine and all that crap.  Of course it’s a horrible thing that’s happening, but I’m just not interested in throwing the character’s integrity under the bus for the sake of virtue signalling.

So I won’t.

It may get brought up in passing, and if things get particularly harrowing I might include it just to kind of work through things myself, but I’m avoiding that unless it can’t be avoided any further.  Lily is going to stay a fun, relatively light story, and war isn’t a part of that in any appreciable way.  I am creator, I have spoken.

This story is at an interesting time.  I don’t know where to take her, quite honestly.  She’s a vtuber, but she’s not.  She’s a work of serial fiction, but she’s not.  She’s a character in her own right, but she’s not.  She’s a YouTuber, but she’s not.  I wish I could figure it out.