Hi! It’s me! The Creator!

So yesterday I made the first Lily YouTube I’ve made in a while.  I tweaked the voice, and I got rid of the little snicker in favor of a higher pitched giggle.  I like it better, but the snicker kind of made its way into her character, and I actually have to actively stop myself from doing it.  I’m not a very good actor.

In fact, I made a mistake in editing.  It’s not one that’s easily fixed, but I’m probably going to leave it.  The reason is that she’s a 16 year old who’s not the greatest at editing.  Even if I could have done better, well, she’s entitled to a mistake every now and then.  That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.  At least, until my perfectionism gets the best of me and I fix and reupload it.

Truth be told, I don’t like her YouTubes the way they are.  Yes, they’re kind of a work in progress, and her body model is much better than it used to be.  Also, I’ve been actively working on the voice.  While these things could stand to be improved even more (ultimately, I don’t think I will ever be quite capable of doing her voice justice without a lot of technological help I haven’t figured out yet) they’re not why I’m not comfortable.  It’s because they’re not entertaining.  I’ve been doing them as an offshoot of her diary, and that’s perfectly valid, but all she does is talk about her day.  Maybe that’s what a sixteen year old will do, but…  I’m not happy.

This is, truth be told, the biggest weakness of the Lily project, and the one I’m having the most difficulty in surmounting.  Lily is a great story.  The few people who read it regularly love it.  I’ve created a character with her own life and personality, and she is cute and lovable and all those things.  But the story is the entertainment.  By which I mean, making YouTubes that are based upon her story just doesn’t work well.  The story stands on its own, but the YouTubes on top of it is really just nothing but an interesting technological experiment.  Essentially, it’s a medium I’m not coming anywhere near to taking even the slightest steps towards full advantage of.

Whilst the YouTubes are kind of an important part of my vision for her (and one of the first things that I had envisioned doing, even before the story), I’m not sure how I can make them work in their current form.

I’m also starting to regret a little bit including Jack into the story.  He’s there and I’m not going to get rid of him – or at least I don’t plan to at present.  It would be an interesting and heartbreaking story to write, but I just don’t want to do that to her, or myself, right now.  But that closed off a whole bunch of possible storylines, and while I’ve been keeping even the Patreon content part PG-13, I’m still not sure I didn’t make a huge mistake in giving her a nascent sex life (if you haven’t read the Patreon, and since there are no subscribers of course you didn’t, she refuses to go “all the way” until marriage, but they’ve done a bit of fooling around and, well, he gets the job done).  It’s something a teenager her age would do.  It’s not something I’m quite as comfortable with Lily doing.

But maybe I’m just being a bit fatherly.

The hardest part about writing Jack, though, is that there’s not much for him to do in the story.  His job is basically to meet up with her every now and then, give her chocolate, and otherwise just be there in the background and do nothing.  Basically, a somewhat useless character that I have to go through hoops to have her spend time with.  This was a terrible decision and I’m afraid I’m going to have to do something drastic to correct it.

Basically, I just have some very mixed feelings on the whole thing right now.  I’ve invested a year and over 200,000 words into Lily.  I’ve invested a lot of time and a significant amount of money into making this project succeed – and I haven’t at all.  And I’ve tried to branch out into media that make it almost impossible for her to succeed in current form, so…  I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know how to move on from here.

I am actually considering budgeting for an actual voiceover artist, writing a script, all that kind of thing, making some use of after effects and other editing magic, and seeing if that helps any.  But this has its own set of problems.

Maybe I’m just not cut out for this kind of project.