Hi! It’s me! The Creator!

And I have much to talk about today.

So first of all, I have begun creating YouTube videos again.  quite honestly, one of the reasons why I stopped is that I couldn’t get the voice right.  I found a tool that mostly fixes that.  I posted a youtube yesterday and I’m actually pretty happy with the voice – it still retains some of my mannerisms but not nearly as much as it used to. For those curious, it’s voice.ai , and I have a feeling AI is going to help me immeasurably with this project.  I may be able to use Midjourney or some similar tool to finally help me create photorealistic pictures of Lily, and that would really be amazing if I can get the prompts right.  But I’m pretty good with google, so maybe it’s possible.  I’ll be playing with that over the next week or two, and this may completely change the nature of the site and maybe even the way the story manifests (but it won’t change the story itself).

The second thing is a little more fundamental – I am toying with the idea of pulling back on one of the fundamental bedrocks of the Lily story.

When I first created this story, I worked very hard to keep Lily completely separate from my identity.  You may be able to find Lily if you know me, but you cannot find me if you know Lily.  That was by design, but I am starting to think that that was a bad idea and is one of the major factors to lily not being successful.  I had reasons for it, and good reasons, but it may be time to transition Lily away from a kind of hyper-realism to being a particularly well-developed character.  I will be thinking about that, but this may portend some changes to the site and other media as I start to put this into practice.  The diary will, of course, remain the same – I have zero interest in breaking the fourth wall – but the media around the story may need to be modified slightly (or not so slightly).

I think this is partly also because, whatever it is I was trying to work out with Lily personally (and it was at least partially an attempt to work something out) I think I’ve accomplished it.  I understand mostly why I created Lily, what she was to accomplish, and she has served her purpose in that regard.  But she has other purposes she has yet to serve, and it’s time to pivot her in that direction.

Put succcinctly (or TL;DR) some major changes to Lily are coming soon, and I can’t think of any that will not drastically improve the storytelling and the character.

The post Creator Notes – 5/7/2023 first appeared on Backstage Lily.