Hi! It’s me! The Creator!!!

You may have noticed over the last couple of months that I seem to be kind of phoning it in a bit.  Nothing really interesting has happened to Lily and friends, she’s just been kind of living her life.  That’s because I’ve been moving, and I went to a town about 50 miles away from where I used to life.  It’s been expensive, stressful, annoying, and all sorts of other adjectives.  Some days I barely even have the energy to open the laptop to post a lily diary, but I do almost every day.

But things should start heating up a bit in a few days – she’s going to LA to meet her birth father and his family!

She’ll be alright.  But it may not be completely smooth sailing.  We’ll see.

Writing Lily is an experience sometimes – I’ll be honest, I find the world of girls fascinating.  Not in a prurient way (if it was, this story would have taken a very different turn and I’d have stopped writing it long ago), and not in a trans-curious way or anything like that.  Just in a “that’s fascinating” kind of way.  Girls have their own way of looking at the world that’s very different – and in some ways much better – than the world of boys.  Girls, in some ways, have more of a license to be themselves.  Boys always have to be something they’re not, and girls – healthy girls, anyway – just naturally are girls.  I find that semi-freedom a bit refreshing and in some ways I’m jealous of it.

I’m not a girl and I never was a girl, and I have no desire to either be or pretend to be a girl, but it’s still fascinating in its way.  I think that’s why I write Lily the way I do.  It’s not just that I feel strongly about the character, or characters – it’s that I’m writing about something that interests me.  She has a depth to her character that can only come from someone who cares deeply about the topic, and I.. I guess I kinda do, actually.

It’d be really easy to take that in a bad direction, but if I’m being honest, that would make her a pretty one-dimensional character – and the character of a girl as seen through a man’s eyes.  And that’s not what I was trying to accomplish.  I was trying to accomplish, I suppose, putting myself as solidly into the world of a girl as I could, so that the character would have depth, be relatable, and, let’s be frank, be marketable.

And in many ways, I think I actually succeeded.

Crystal is an implicit acknowledgement that the world of girls isn’t always sunshine and moonbeams, pardon the expression.  Sometimes it’s dark.  Girls can hurt each other.  Boys just punch and done – girls aim to destroy.  I added her intentionally, so that there would be a little darkness to the story.  Not too much, but I didn’t want to write a Brady Bunch-esque story where everyone’s happy every day and there’s a nice, buttoned up ending.  I wanted to add darkness to the story, and let Lily deal with it in her own way.  It’s the only way she can grow as a character.  But it’s also a remark on the healing power of having people who love you – Crystal does, and it took a very dark event to prove that to her.

We’re approaching 300,000 words now, and still going strong.