Hi! It’s me! The Creator!  And I have a lot of announcements and things to talk about.  It’s been a while.

First let’s start with the announcements.

I Got rid of patreon

And it’s about time, TBH.  While when I first started the Lily project I was hoping to make some money off of it, I knew for sure that it wouldn’t be from Patreon – or at least I highly suspected it.  The reason I started the Patreon was solely because I wanted to paywall off some of the more “racy” stuff, and I wanted to let Patreon take care of any validation or verification needed.

But as time went on, I started to realize that this was more of a mistake than anything.  I’ve never liked how Patreon treated their creators, I was concerned that they’d think somehow that I broke one of their rules (they’re very mercurial about that kind of thing) and the plugin I was using for integration with the site was actually costing me money – and that recently increased.  At the end of the day, there were no upsides and many downsides.  So I moved over to a subscription model, added that plugin, moved all the pages over to that, removed all prior references to Patreon (while usually I prefer to leave things in for historical reasons, this was one time where that was not appropriate), removed the Patreon plugin, and shut the creator page down.

The only thing I don’t have right now is the ability to actually verify that subscribers are 13 and older, but to be honest, there’s not a whole lot I can do in that regard, and I’m neither subject to the GDPR or collecting any information that would get me in trouble.  About all you can do is see some things that I’d rather not be exposed to everyone who happens on the site (like fanservice pics, etc) and frankly, if you’re not watching your kid, you deserve what you get in that regard.

There will be a subscriber only post coming soon.  I won’t do that often, but Lily has something she wants to talk about and it’s not for young ears or eyes.

I may get rid of this site

When I originally started Lily, I had every intention of making Lily as realistic a character as I could.  I even set it up so people could talk to her and I would respond as if I were her.  This could have been fun, but it also had its creepy aspects, and as the Lily character and story evolved, I abandoned this.  This site (Backstage Lily) was started because I knew that I still had to “break the fourth wall” sometimes, but didn’t want to do it on her main site.

Well, truth be told, that’s not as much of a concern anymore.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do in that regard.  I may keep this site but continue to integrate it deeper.  I may move all the content over and just redirect this site (it’s currently another thing to maintain and has been getting inundated with spam).  But either way, I’m going to do something different soon.

lily is being bookified

I am currently in the process of collating and lightly editing all of the Lily posts and turning them into a book.  It’s currently on wattpad, but once that’s done, maybe I’ll put it on Amazon or something.  It’s a long story, so I might have to do it in volumes.  I don’t know exactly how I’ll do that.  Maybe one per year?  The whole thing is confusing, so we will see.  Either way, I think that’s a necessary step in the evolution of the Lily story.

the lily story is ending soon

And here’s the most bittersweet announcement of all – Lily is ending soon. Probably around September of this year, which is around her 19th birthday.

This story started in July 2021, and I had no idea it would go for as long as it had and evolve in the way it had.  She has grown a lot, and there are many things going on in her life that she’d never have dreamed of before.  But, all good things must come to an end, and she is going to move on to the next stage of her life.  I don’t know if the Lily story will completely end, but I think that this stage of her story is going to come to a decisive end.

It will be about 500,000 words at that point, spread over three years, and there just comes a time when you have to move on, both for me and for Lily.  There will be many fun things going on before now and then, but then will have to come eventually.  I’ll post more as that time approaches.

On a more personal note, this has been a real journey for me, and I will be sad to see her go.  Posting a Lily entry has been a nightly ritual for me (give or take) for nearly three years now, and I don’t know what I will do when it’s gone.  Nonetheless, it must happen.

I tried many ways to monetize Lily and to make her an interesting product, including vtubing, twitch streams, and many other things, and none of them worked.  I nearly perfected that art, but at the end of the day, it just wasn’t to be.  She lives on her diary, and that’s where she will leave us as well.

There will be other announcements as the time approaches.  I’ll post more as it nears.