Category: From The Creator

Today’s changes are to April 27, 2024 and August 29, 2024.  Both of these changes revolve around Yuki.

In the first entry, I decided to change some of the “tell” to “show”.  I’m still not completely happy with it, but now Yuki actually talks to Lily about her graduation instead of Lily just recounting the conversation after the fact..

And in the second… I at least partly corrected a huge mistake.  I made Yuki’s English very broken and bad, even though she’s not really that way in the rest of the story.  Even if I allow for Lily cleaning up the grammar a little in the retelling, I still think I did Yuki a huge disservice.  So I changed the grammar to have fewer (but not no) mistakes.  The mistakes she made before would be appropriate for an Asian language, but you have to be really bad at English to screw up quite that bad, and Yuki has shown (even from the beginning) to be reasonably competent.

I may yet go back and fix it just a bit more (as well as maybe running Miki’s Japanese past someone who speaks it better than I do) but I’ve been feeling these changes are necessary for a while now.

Today I took my first step towards fixing some of the errors in this story.  While I feel that the story is pretty solid as it is and I don’t want to completely rewrite it, it is a story.  And there’s no reason I can’t go back to fix stuff I don’t like or feel like could be improved.

The fix I did today was in the January 14, 2024 entry.  This is the entry where Anathema’s life changes.

When I wrote last night’s entry about the body models, I started thinking about Anathema, and about her back story.  How does such a pure girl turn into such a whore?  It’s not just something that happens – there’s usually a reason for it, and it’s usually trauma.

But this highlights something else about this story:  this is the second time (or maybe the first of two, but I think second) that I wrote about a teen girl having a relationship with an older man.  Note please that in both cases I didn’t treat this as something that was desirable.  It’s not.  Sometimes the relationships are, if not legally, at least in intention, consensual.  Sometimes there’s actual love there.  And sometimes (well, often but not 100 percent of the time) that love is pretty one-sided.  And the innocence of a girl is taken away.  Or given away, maybe.

Anathema found a man that she thought she was going to be with for the rest of her life, that she thought would make her dreams come true, that made her feel wonderful things she’d never experienced in her life before.  And she thought much, much more of that relationship than he did, and when she found out that it wasn’t to be… it broke her.  She turned into the cat-girl we know and…  tolerate?  She became, let’s be frank, a pleasure-seeking whore who sought out as much physical pleasure as she could find to hide the empty hole that that man ripped out of her heart.

And it took Jesus to fix her.

This story has never shied away from difficult topics.  And this is a difficult topic.  But I think I handled it well, and I think now, I handled it even better.  Unlike in Crystal’s case, Anathema’s “boyfriend” never had any consequences.  She never told.  Deep down, she still loves him.

And that’s probably the greatest tragedy of all.  Sometimes bonds aren’t broken, even in the midst of the worst betrayals possible.

When I first created this story, I had in mind to voice Lily also as a vtuber character, and made some steps towards making that happen.  It didn’t, for two reasons.  Reason 1:  I couldn’t find a voice changer that worked well enough to disguise the fact that the voice was, well, mine (that actually changed towards the end of the run).  Reason 2:  It was just plain awkward.

But as a part of that I created 3d .vrm models for all (or most at least) of the main characters.  The first model I created was this:

This model was okay for a first step, but to be honest, I didn’t really know how to use the vr generation program, which was vroid (and to be fair, the version of vroid I used was far less featureful than the versions that came out later).  I used 3tene to animate her, and found the dress on booth.pm.  The reason I brought up that the version of vroid was less featureful was that the program was designed to create, well, cute anime girls. I couldn’t do too much with her, and it kind of defaulted to a lot, well, sexier than I would have liked.

You might notice her boobs are a bit large.  This was a mistake.  I’ll explain more about that in a bit.

Her second iteration looked like this:

This iteration was better in some ways and worse in others.  The feedback I got on this model was that she looked too grown up and sexy.  I didn’t do that on purpose, but I agree in hindsight.  Her breasts were too large again (and I will again talk about that in a bit), her stockings were actually a bit out of character, etc.  I did like her dress, but all told, this was a mistake.

After I got some feedback that “a man must have written this”, well, I took that a bit personally, and I modified her body model a little.

Many of the changes were “underneath”, so to speak.  I believe I changed her body skin (which no one but me will ever see), I reduced her breast size, I think I adjusted her hips, and made her face look a little more youthful.  I don’t think I did a perfect job, but it reflected her character a little better.

Truth be told, I don’t like how I made the breasts too large in the beginning.  It was a mistake, and one that I will forever regret.  It’s not because I don’t like big breasts, or because I like small breasts, it’s because Lily is supposed to be a teenage girl, and I let some ideas about how a woman’s body looks override who Lily actually is.  That was a huge, huge mistake, and I wish I could take it back.   But all I could do was fix the body model and move on.

The last iteration of her body model is this:

This is my favorite body model by far.  What I like about it is, it’s cute.  I deliberately toned down some of the more blatant female aspects (her breasts are normal sized, her hips are normal sized, I adjusted her face to be more in line with how I imagined it, and even her pose is a lot more innocent than the previous models.  This is much more the Lily that I’d imagined than the previous models.  It helped that I had a lot more knobs to turn with the newest version of vroid, and another tool was also available to pose her far better than 3tene (or vroid) allowed.  That tool also allowed me to pose all of the other girls at the same time, too.  Previously I had to use blender, and that’s just a royal pain.

There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes for a project like that.

While I’m at it, let me also discuss some of the other body models.

This is Liz.  Her body model was particularly difficult, because she was deliberately described as a smaller girl who was not as, well, developed as Lily.  Her hips are smaller, and so are her breasts.  The later models of vroid made that a lot easier.  She’s also described as pretty studious and dressing very nicely.  I don’t really think the shoes fit her, but otherwise, I like how this model turned out.  This was her first model:

 

Which actually wasn’t too bad, but wasn’t great either.  This was one of the renders I did in blender.  The only one, actually.

Now for Beth:

Beth was difficult because Lily played her up a little too much, and it was hard to pick an outfit/skin tone/etc for her that would do her justice.  This turned out alright but I’m also a little unhappy with how she turned out.  Maybe I’ll redo her model at some point.

One of the limiting factors of all of this is what’s available on booth.pm.  Because of the nature of vtubing, etc., the outfits that are available are about 90% sexy/fetish/whatever, and I had to pick really, really carefully.  Particularly because I didn’t want to pick any that had a license that required attribution.  It limited what I could do, but I guess it worked out… Mostly.

The ahoge is cute though.  (See below for a more recent model)

Okay, here’s Diana.

In some ways Diana was the easiest.  Her attitude is more in her pose than anything, so I just picked something that looked a little appropriate and it worked out.  I actually wanted to make her a little pudgier, but this is where I came across the limitations of vroid.  It wasn’t an option.

And…  Crystal.

I envisioned Crystal as dressing in kind of a gothic lolita kind of style, and it mostly worked.  This was another instance where I ran up against the limitations of booth.pm.  Without designing my own clothing (and who has time for that?) I pretty much had to make do.  This was alright.  It could have been better.

I did a body model of cat-girl (Anathema):

This one I actually didn’t like.  At all.  I mean, her body is fine, but it was difficult getting her face and hair, etc., right.  I may redo it, but I may… not.

Here are a couple of other pictures of Lily I experimented with.  They have their plusses and minuses.

That last one…  It was supposed to be fanservice.  It ended up just being awkward.  But, well, I guess you can see.

This was also supposed to be fanservice.  I was playing around with the body model.. and dressed her in a bikini and put her on Patreon, back when I was using it.  I don’t really see the point of that.  It’s a cute picture, and I love the expression on her face.  But if I were to do it again, I’d pick the background more carefully (It was supposed to be in Orlando, and, well.. .there’s no place in Orlando that looks like that).  I’d also choose a slightly different body skin.  This one worked, but not well with the bikini.

I do like the pose, but mostly just because it’s pretty perfectly done.  It really does look like she’s jumping.  Now if I could just add a shadow…

Where vroid completely fell over was…. Sabby.

The reason it fell over wasn’t so much because of the skin color or the face or anything like that – it’s because vroid is designed for cute, sexily dressed anime girls.  It’s not designed for middle-aged, short, slightly pudgy motherly figures with big breasts.  I could not make her pudgy – it wasn’t an option.  All I could do was dress her as frumpily as I could and pose her in such a way as to make up for vroid’s shortcomings.  This is where what I was trying to do with vroid fell flat, and about where I started giving up on the whole body model thing.  And don’t even get me started on Dave!

And vroid also kinda fell over here, bad.

This is Allison.  She is based on a girl who I am familiar with (I have never met her in person but know her mother) from real life.  She was eight or so when this picture was made.  The problem is that vroid is, AGAIN, designed for cute/sexy anime girls.  Trying to make an eight year old was mostly impossible.  This was another situation where I just had to turn some dials all the way down (you know, chest size, etc) and then add baggy clothing to hide the rest.  Because of that I was VERY DISPLEASED with how this turned out, but I literally couldn’t have done much more without actually editing the photo manually.

It was close enough, and her mother was fine with how it turned out, but I never tried to do that again.  Maybe vroid has improved in that regard.  I’ll have to poke at it when I get some spare time.

This led to a rather unfortunate situation where Liz and Allison had nearly the same size for some particular measurements, and that is not a situation I was pleased with.

She’s twelve now.  It might be slightly more doable if I tried again.  I won’t.

Let’s see, what else do I have.

This is a picture I created of Lily wearing kimono in Japan.  It turned out okay, but I don’t like it.  Maybe I should try again with her new body model.

And this is Beth’s latest body model.  I actually like this one better, for the same reason I like Lily’s better.  I ran into similar booth.pm issues, her dress is a little sexier than I would like, but it turned out alright.  I don’t like how her lip color interacts with her skin tone, but oh well.  It’s a little thing.  I’m not a huge fan of how slender vroid makes the legs and doesn’t really give much of a slider to fix that, but I guess it’s cute enough.

Hmm.  I have a couple of others.  I have one of cat-girl that, well…  you’re not going to see.  I made that one for “fanservice”, but I was never happy with the fact that I even made it, so it will stay hidden for now.

 

This one was cute.  I actually like it.  I did a good job with the posing, I like her dress, all that.  But it just never actually fit with the story and I will probably remove it when I figure out which post I attached it to.

I think I have one of Lily in a maid outfit somewhere.  I never uploaded it to this page, it was used just for a youtube.  Maybe I will.

Anyway, that’s some behind-the-scenes stuff about the characters’ body models, etc.  It’s more difficult than it appears, isn’t it?  I mean, it’d be really easy to make some or all of the characters (except Allison for at least TWO reasons, and only one is age, the other is the inadequacy of the body model) in all sorts of different outfits and stuff, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t serve the story, and keeping the models appealing while also staying true to their character is not easy.  I missed the mark more than once.  But I hope the current models are pretty close.

It’s Father’s Day, so it seems like a good time to write about Dave, Lily’s adoptive father.

Dave was always a difficult character to write, and there were multiple reasons for that.

Reason number 1:  I didn’t know what a “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” story was when I started writing Lily.  I mean, I kinda understood the concept, but I didn’t know it had a name.  But as I continued writing, I started watching anime (which I’ve mostly grown past now) and realized that it’s a thing.  It’s a genre characterized by, well… cute girls doing cute things.  But also by the fact that there are few male characters, and often no male characters.

Clearly I didn’t go whole hog into the no male characters trope, but I did have very few.  There’s Dave, David, “owner” (who we never find out his real name.  It’s some Indian name I never got around to choosing), Jack, Liz’s boyfriend, and pretty much every other male character in the story is a jerk, a creep, or ends up in jail/prison. (I’m thinking of a few exceptions after I wrote this, but it’s true in essence.)

In hindsight, this says a lot about me.

Reason number 2:  I don’t really know how to write men.  This might be surprising, because I am one, but the truth is that pretty much everyone who knows me would know that I suck as a man.  I’ve always tended to identify more with women.  (This is not the same thing at all as identify as a woman).  I don’t get boys or men, and I find them difficult to understand and interact with.  It’s not that I hate them at all, but I just don’t understand them.  I kind of understand women.  You’d think this would make my life easier in some ways, but noooooo.

And reason number 3:  My father sucked.  I mean, seriously sucked.  I have no role models with which to write a good male father character.  My father died a couple of years ago.  I don’t remember the exact date and I don’t care.  It’s a particular effort not to wish him to be in hell at the moment (I don’t, but sometimes I catch myself slipping).

But when I wrote Dave, I didn’t want to let any of these things get in the way.  So I ended up writing a male character that had a difficult time with emotion, mostly kept to himself, and was a very logical, analytic and thoughtful person.  But on the other hand, he also was very protective, was not afraid to step in to keep Sabby in check when she needed it (that happened at least once), and was actually a pretty good father, if flawed.

That’s why Dave was difficult to write, in the end.  I didn’t know how to write him.

There’s nothing wrong with a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story.  Let’s be honest, a story full of women can be kind of mercurial and go off the rails a bit, and sometimes male characters are needed to bring stability.  That’s kind of the role Dave and Jack filled for Lily, in a way.  Even in the CGDCT stories where there are no males, there’s often a female that takes the male role of keeping things in check.

I’m not upset with how I wrote the men in this story.  I’m really not.  That’s because there really is nothing wrong with a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story, and it was really important to me to explore the relationships between Lily and her sisters.  Women to tend to form very strong friend groups, and I wanted to explore the dynamics of that.  And I think I did a pretty good job.  In that kind of story, there’s not really a place for a male as a main character.  I accept this.  But on the other hand, I don’t think the story would have been what it is without Dave.  Diana had a single mother and her father was a deadbeat.  But if Sabby were a single mother…  I don’t think it would have turned out well.  Dave was necessary to the story and Lily loved him deeply.  And he loved Lily just as much.  Even if he had a hard time showing it sometimes.

Put another way, I think I would have rather had Dave than my own father.

And that means I did an okay job writing him.

So… some things about Dave I never put in the story.  He didn’t like to talk too much about his past.  He wasn’t in the military.  But he did have some close friends that were, and they died in the gulf war or some such.  He also knew some people who were in the WTC when the towers fell in 2001.  So he had a lot of experience with losing people close to him to war or other things.  That’s why he always got a little depressed when memorial day, etc., came around.  It’s not that he was some kind of super-patriotic guy, or anything, but he remembered, and it made him sad.

But he has a hard time with emotions, so he just sat in his chair and let the world go by sometimes.

His prank wars with Lily were legendary, but that’s kind of his way of showing love, in a way.  He met his match with her, but gave as good as he got.  Lily didn’t mention it too much, but he also had a rather weird sense of humor, and was the type to tell dad jokes sometimes and make everyone groan.  He also really loved Sabby and took his duties as a husband and a father seriously.  Sabby was a difficult woman to wrangle, but she always remembered what made her fall in love with him in the first place, so she was willing to be a little submissive when she needed to.  He didn’t take charge often, but when he did, she knew he was probably right, so she let him.  Even if she hated that and had to blow off some steam.

I mean, putting cayenne pepper in chocolate pudding?  That’s genius.  Especially when you’re dealing with Lily…

Anyway…  I think Dave turned out to be a decent character, even if I didn’t do the best job writing him sometimes.

When I first added cat-girl to the character roster, I wasn’t actually sure about that decision.  She started out as a one-dimensional “slut” character.  Actually, I’m kinda not joking about that.  We initially met cat-girl because she wanted to help to advertise the bakery (I don’t even remember how she found her way into the story, honestly).  She immediately went out wearing nothing but fifth-element bandages (you know, those white bandages that Milla Jovovich wore) and caused a couple of car accidents.

Throughout the rest of the story, she was barely even comic relief.  She was pretty much an exhibitionist slut who just wanted to show and use her body in any way possible, and Lily and Sabby basically had a full time job just trying to keep her from getting them in a whole heap of legal trouble.  I think comic relief is the best way to describe her, but maybe more accurately, she was a sweet and well-meaning thorn in everyone’s side that they just kept around because she made the bakery a lot of money.

I mean, Lily wouldn’t even describe some of the stuff she “wore”.  Not just because that would have made this the kind of story I didn’t want, but because she was embarrassed.  I mean, one time she wore nothing but a ribbon.  Another time, well… Lily was too embarrassed to say, but when Lily and Sabby made the mistake of relaxing the boundaries a little, she came in in full leather fetish gear.  And, let’s say, it was the type that didn’t cover much but if someone had taken even the smallest liberties… would have put her into a very vulnerable, immobile, and difficult to escape from position she’d have enjoyed very much.  If you get my meaning.

Quite frankly, I don’t understand why Lily and Sabby didn’t just kick her to the curb.  I would have…

I wasn’t sure about that decision right up until her redemption arc.  And then, suddenly, she turned out to be more of a tragic character than anything.  I mean, poor girl wanted to be a housewife.  How did she get here from there?

We never really found out, and frankly, I should probably explore that.  It might make a good short story.

Anyway, the moment she was “redeemed”, I guess, was the moment we found out her real name.  “Anathema”.  Set apart.  But sometimes anathema is a word used in a negative way.  When I saw that word (when I was trying to figure out what to name her, I actually looked up names that mean “set apart” or something like that) I knew it was perfect for her.

It’s an unusual name, too.

And then she turned out to be one of the most… beautiful characters of the whole story, if a little undeveloped, I suppose.

I love how her character arc turned out once “the boss” set her in the right direction.  She then turns right around and tells Lily right to her face that she’s being selfish.  Who else could get away with that?  But… this is Anathema.  She never shies away from saying what she thinks.  Or doing what she wants.  It’s just that what she wants… changed.

So at the end, I still kind of regret what I did with her character, but she turned out to have a fairly important role in the story, and she’s perhaps the character that has the most…  notable change of character in the entire story.  And truth be told, not having to rein her in anymore was a relief.  That girl always wanted to push the envelope and I was always fighting with her to keep her body to herself.  If I’d let her, she woulda at least nailed Lily (though as she explained, she did know it was a bad idea), probably Crystal (bad girl!), and probably would have tried to get everyone together at the same time.  But I didn’t let her do any of that.  She kept it out of work… mostly.  There was that one time…

But at the end of the day, I’m not going to retcon her out.  She did serve her purpose.  Even if I probably should have reined her in a little better.

I don’t think I ever mentioned her last name, did I?  Well…  I won’t here, either.

Sabby, Lily’s adopted mother, was not necessarily my favorite character, but she was at the top of my favorite characters to write.

When I first wrote Sabby, I had in my mind the character of a sassy black woman, but one with a lot of heart.  Lily always says that Sabby “goes all Claire Huxtable on people”, and that’s kind of who I had in mind when I wrote Sabby.  I mean, maybe she was physically different.  In my mind, she was always a little darker, just a little plumper, a little more well-endowed…  maybe a little shorter.  I always thought of Sabby as beautiful, but not necessarily in a statuesque kind of way.  Maybe more like in a motherly kind of way.

But she was modeled after Claire Huxtable (of the Cosby Show) in a few ways.  The most obvious was that she was a genuinely caring woman with a temper and a protective instinct like a lion, and when she went off, you’d better listen or else.  And it’s not even that she’d scream or yell, she’d just get quiet and clipped with her voice, and then if you didn’t listen, you were gonna get smacked.

But as the story progressed, Sabby’s character deepened.  She wasn’t just a one-dimensional sassy block woman character.  She lost her parents at an early age, made a lot of bad decisions, had foster parents that she had decidedly mixed feelings about.  She also had a fairly well hidden stream of insecurity about her, like she sometimes didn’t really feel like she deserved the good life she had.  And towards the end, when Katie asked her and Lily to be little Sabrina’s god-daughter, she was rather introspective about it.

I want you to make one more promise to us,” Sabby said.  “If you’re serious about this.”

Katie nodded.  “Anything.”

“Well, we’ll see.  I want you to promise that, when you find another man, that you will take our opinions of him seriously.  You…  already made one bad choice, and…  I will not have my goddaughter having a, well… you know… as a stepfather.”

Katie’s face contorted a little, but then she relaxed and nodded.  “I hate that.  It makes me a little angry.  But…  you’re right.  It’s best for her.”

Sabby blew out a breath.  “That was not fun to say,” she said.  “I know I have this reputation as a lion, and Lily likes to say I ‘go all Claire Huxtable on people’” – I giggled and she shot me a look – “but it’s not an easy thing to do,” she said, rather softly for her.  She looked at me.  “I hate doing it,” she said, “and if you tell anyone else, I’ll deny it.  But I hate having to say these things, I hate having to be a lion.”  She actually deflated a little.  “But I’ll do what I need to do for my family.  For family I have, and…  and for family I chose.”  She reached down, and in an uncharacteristic gesture for Sabby, she stroked Katie’s face a little.  “This makes you family too,” she said, softly.  “And I’ll be a lion for you too.”

Sabby takes her role as a mother very seriously, and she wasn’t a lion because that was her nature, but because that’s what she felt she had to be for people she cared about.

Sabby is also a very… moral… character.  It’s not because she’s perfect – far from it – but because the feels strongly about those things.  Lily’s pretty grounded, but Sabby’s always Lily’s moral rock.  She’s one of only a few people who can call her out on her crap and have Lily actually listen (Cat-girl/Anathema is another).  Multiple times in the story, she called Lily out on one of her major flaws – the desire to please people because of the fear she’ll lose them.

I liked writing Sabby, and that’s partly because I didn’t always know which facets of Sabby’s character would show.  Or be revealed.  She may not be my absolute favorite character, but she might have been the most interesting character to write.  Lily loved her for a reason, and maybe the reader would grow to understand that as the story progresses.

Lily alluded to this at the very end, but Sabby’s actually conservative.  She’s not quite a Trump supporter or MAGA, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders, and knows how much damage misplaced compassion can cause.  Dave…  was more liberal.  I didn’t say too much about that because this wasn’t a political story and Lily was not a political girl, but Dave did start to come around around the time of the fateful Joe Biden debate.  Sabby and Dave still have… ummm… words sometimes.

I’ll write more about Dave soon, but I’ll say this:  while I wrote Dave as more liberal, he’s more of an old school liberal, you know, like Bill Maher or some of the old-school Democrats.  He was still a good father to Lily, and she did love him deeply.  And he would have protected her if he’d needed to.

In my story, race was not something to be ignored, and it was not something to be celebrated, either.  It was just something that…  was.  Sabby was black.  Dave was white.  Lily was half-Japanese.  Emiko was full Japanese.  Beth and David were half-black (what we would have called “mulatto” back when that was more of a descriptive word than anything else – and it’s funny because this is the first time I actually realized David is half-black).  Liz and Jack were Chinese.  Diana was Mexican.  Crystal was… white, I think.  I don’t think I ever explicitly said but that’s just how I imagined her.  Lily had friends and family of all races, colors, etc…  and it was never a big deal.  Only Yu, Rebecca’s friend, had SJW tendencies, and her friends mostly just patted her on the head and went on with their lives.  That was a deliberate choice.  It wasn’t a big deal to Lily… neither in a positive or negative way.  No one in the story had any hate in them – but they also didn’t put anyone on a pedestal because of what they were.  It’s just something that was, and people just accepted whatever and moved on.  Black or white, Lily didn’t care what Sabby was, as long as she made her ample chest available to cry on when Lily needed it.  Or maybe more accurately because she made her ample chest available to cry on when Lily needed it.

That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

Because, frankly, any issues with race today are issues of culture, and that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not opening here.

I’m sure, if you’ve read this story, you’ve seen the deep ties that this story has with Japan.  That wasn’t a coincidence… for some reason.  I mean, Lily is half Japanese.  Her mother is Japanese.  She is learning Japanese.  At the end (spoiler) she is living in Japan.  She makes several trips to Japan, and Japan is always going to be very close to her heart.

There was something interesting that happened with the Lily story as it progressed.  I started with the express intention of creating a character that was as unlike me as possible.  She is a (reasonably beautiful) teenage girl.  I’m a middle-aged guy pushing fifty.  She’s outgoing, friendly and extroverted.  I’m, well… none of those things, really.  She’s almost literally everything I’m not, and I did that on purpose.  There are multiple reasons for that, but I think one of the major reasons was that of the many reasons I created her, one of the most important was that I wanted a character through which I could work some stuff out in my own life.

Specifically, I wanted to understand why the life of a character such as Lily’s is so appealing to me on a visceral level.  It’s not so much that I want to live it, because I’m nothing if not practical and there is absolutely no way that is possible.  (You’ll hear a bunch of people tell you it is, if you just identify as it.  That is a lie).  It’s more that there’s something about it that is strongly attractive to me and I needed to find out why so I could work through it.

The same thing is true for Japan, in my life.  There has always been, but lately even moreso, something that is strongly attractive to me about it.  And Lily also ended up being an avenue to explore that as well.

As I continued to write the story, I failed utterly at my original goal.  I found Lily’s and my personality converging in some ways.  Clearly not in all ways, but she started to be into more of the things I am, and I found that voicing her personality subtly changed mine as well.  It’s not like I became her, because clearly I didn’t, but she was always this quiet presence in my head, and sometimes I’d think to myself “I wonder how Lily would react to this”, and she’d kinda tell me.  Not in voices, no, but just in… presence, in a sense.  I created a character so well that in some ways she might as well exist.

Maybe put another way, I know Lily better than anyone else on this planet, because I made her, and she’s a part of me.

As I continued the story, some weird stuff happened.  For example, there were a few story arcs where she went somewhere.  Like, for example, the first time she went to Japan.  If you look at the times (not the dates, but the times) that I wrote the story, you’ll see that they were actually written (or at least dated) for the times that the actual events would have been happening.  I did research.  I knew when she would be at the airport, I knew which flights she was taking, I knew how long they would take, I knew when it took off, I knew when it landed.  I knew absolutely everything about her journey.  I knew what the weather was like in Japan, I researched train lines, I even kept track of which hotel she might have stayed at and where.  I knew as much as was humanly possible about her journey.  And I found myself genuinely excited for her.  I was thinking things like “Lily is in the air now”, “Lily is in Saitama right now”…  “Lily’s in ookunoshima petting the bunnies”… and as she was doing all those things, it was so much like I was, even though I was sitting in my house working or doing whatever.  I was even kind of disappointed when the arc ended, even though I knew that I was running out of material and she needed to go home.  There were times when I loved writing the story because Lily was loving what she was doing and Lily is a part of me.

So I took some of my (inexplicable, and frankly sometimes undeserved) love of Japan, and gave it to Lily, and she loves Japan too.

I wrote this story with the intent of learning about myself, and I guess I did, but I put a lot of myself into the story too.

But here’s the interesting thing:  I’m not Lily.  I was very clear about that from the very beginning.  I created Lily, I know Lily, Lily is in some ways like a daughter to me, but I’m not her.  I’ve never considered myself her, even when I was looking into way to voice her and bring her to life.  She’s always been her own person.  She loves Japan because she’s half Japanese, and it’s part of her heritage.  Her birth mother (Emiko) is from Japan, she has family there, she has friends there, she has sisters (adopted, but still) there.  She’s not like me – a nearly fifty year old white as they come Otaku/weeb adjacent (I refuse to identify as either of those because it’s a lot deeper than that for me).  It’s family for her.

Lily has her reasons for loving Japan, but at the end of the day, maybe she’s not as different from me as I was trying to make her at the beginning.

And I guess that’s fine.  The long and short is – there’s a part of me that’s living in Japan right now and living her best life, even if only in my imagination.

More as a reminder to me than a promise:  Next post:  Sabby.

When I started the Lily story, I really didn’t have a well planned out direction of where I wanted the story to go.  I knew I wanted the main character to be a teenage girl that had a personality as opposite to me as possible.  I knew I wanted her to live a fairly normal teenage life with lots of friends and sisters.  And I knew there was going to be a supernatural element to the story.

I didn’t know exactly what the nature of that supernatural element was going to be, but I knew that there was going to be a supernatural element.

The honest truth about this story is that I didn’t know where it was going to go from day to day, any more than the readers did.  I had a general direction, but I often sat down at the computer, said to myself “I wonder what Lily’s up to today”… and then I found out.

A few characters actually emerged as the story progressed, characters I wasn’t planning on as the story was progressing.  The idols, for example.  Jack (and I’m still not convinced he was a good choice).  And…. “The Boss”.

From the very beginning, faith and religion have a pretty strong influence in Lily’s life.  I mean, the way she found Dave and Sabby at first was that one of the doctors that tended to her went to Dave and Sabby’s church, and the pastor is the one who connected them.  This is explained in the very first diary that Lily wrote.  And as it proceeds, we find out that Dave and Sabby are actually pretty strong people of faith, and Christianity is actually a pretty strong driver and influence in Lily’s new life.  But what I’m particularly proud of is that fact that I don’t ever explicitly say that.

Nowhere in the story does anyone get preachy.  In fact, kind of the opposite.

From the very beginning of the story, Sabby is conflicted about her faith.  She has a strong faith, but she wrestles with it.  She’s not a super-christian lady who runs around preaching Jesus to everyone she meets.  She’s a woman with a past, one who found redemption and turned her life around, but she still has a past, she still has traumas, and she’s still dealing with them.  She finds comfort in her church and in God, but there are things she finds difficult.

And this is a theme throughout the story, actually.  Lily finds religion a difficult topic, and she finds church life to be difficult as well.  She likes all of the social ties that church brings, and she’s grateful to the church and the pastor for everything they’ve done for her, but she’s very aware (and surprisingly so) of how much they also fail her.  She and the pastor butt heads more than once as they try to understand what her “calling” is, and sometimes the pastor needs to have a teachable moment (and so does Lily).

Lily is not a story about Christianity.  It’s a story about a Christian family.  And there’s a big difference.

But about three quarters of the way through the story, a new character was introduced, “the Boss”.  It’s a character that kind of manifests as she starts to understand more about how she came to be what she is.  And as she learns more about that character, she finds out… it’s Jesus.  But even then, the story does not get preachy.  As is always the case when I write Jesus as a character (this isn’t the first story in which I’ve done that), I didn’t write him as a religious character.  I wrote him as a character with the attributes of Jesus, but as just a part of the story.  And there’s a significant distinction there.

This story is not and never was an avenue for preaching Jesus, and yet what it turned into was a story where Christian values and Christian thought takes a significant role, but just as a background fact, not as the point of the story.  It’s just something that is.

And that’s, frankly, why I suspect this story was somewhat inspired.  I’m not sure how I could have pulled that off by myself.

I have a pretty conflicted relationship with religion, Christianity, and Jesus myself.  I don’t think I could live with myself if I wrote a story where everyone was just super great Christian people and Jesus was this “angelic” character that comes down out of nowhere and saves everyone.  Life is more difficult than that, even Christian life, maybe especially Christian life.  Sure, Jesus saves and all that, but what that actually means is something that often involves a lot of pain and tears and a whole lot of other stuff that Christians like to gloss over.  I didn’t want to gloss over it in Lily’s story.  I wanted the pain and the tears and…  also the victories and triumphs…  to be at the forefront.

I wanted the story to be alive.

I regret a lot of things about Lily, but strangely enough (and even more strangely if you know me well) that’s not one of them.  The story did not turn out to be preachy, it was sometimes emotional and raw and sometimes religion, etc., wasn’t portrayed positively.  But at the end of the day, it’s a story where “the Boss” and the faith of Lily’s family and friends had a significant role in making her life better.  And in return, she as a “walking shrine” made everyone’s life better too.  Because, in a real way, the God that she enshrines is Jesus.

Interestingly, I took something for granted, by the way.  Many times through the story, Lily calls herself a “walking shrine”, and Japanese people tend to bow and clap at her.  I didn’t realize until like last week that this would go over most peoples’ heads.  See…  when Japanese people worship, they go to a shrine, drop a coin or some money into the shrine, ring a bell, bow, clap, pray, clap some more, and then leave… mostly in that order.  They’re paying their respects to the kami (God) that they believe is enshrined in the, well, shrine.  The reason the Japanese people tend to bow and clap at her when they find out she’s a walking shrine is that… well… that’s how they worship at a shrine.

They’re being respectful to lily’s enshrined kami, even though they don’t know who he is and even though it annoys the snot out of Lily.

In the story, “The Boss” doesn’t mind this.  It’s not that he thinks it’s a superior form of worship, but they are worshipping, and when they worship at Lily, they’re actually worshipping a real god who has real powe.r  Something Yuki learns to her great surprise when her obaasan (grandmother) is healed.  In fact, he says that somewhat directly in one of the diary posts.

But that doesn’t mean their style of worship is wrong.  It’s just that they’re so used to worshipping things (like enshrined Gods) that have little to no power.

So that’s why they keep bowing and clapping at Lily, and why Lily gets so annoyed at it.

Anyway, that was my thoughts on this.  I’m kind of happy with how that part of the story turned out, being honest.  I don’t think I went too far in any particular way, and that might be the most difficult thing about writing this kind of story.

I just installed Linux Mint on an old Dell laptop I have, so now I can write these while making use of, well, my lap.  Yay me.  One of these days I’m going to get around to trying Devuan – I hate systemd so, so much.  My two week vacation starts in a couple of weeks and the hope is that I can spend that time with all these projects – including Lily.  In between much needed naps.

I’ve added a new “Diary” page called “From the Creator”.  I’ve lately felt the need to post things in my voice, and this seems the best way.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep this story related.  But I think it’s time I talk about some things that I’ve had to be careful about putting on the “diary”.  See, the diary is supposed to be in Lily’s voice.  I did add that “footer” where I write comments, but I didn’t really like doing that, even when I did it.  So this seemed like a good compromise.

Anyway, I really wanted to talk about idols.

About halfway through the story, I started introducing some Japanese idol characters.  It started with Yuki (whose real name is Rika, but Lily will never reveal that in-story).  This happened because I listened to the song “Idol” by “Yoasobi”, who wrote the OP for “Oshi no ko”, an anime about, well, the idol industry.  And there’s something about that whole thing that really struck a nerve with me.  It’s an industry full of girls and young women (well, some men too, but…) who basically are required to form parasocial relationships with their fans.  It really made me sad, and I knew that I needed to add some into my story.  And, well, I did.

It started with Yuki, but I then added the After-School Friends Idol Light Music Club (which I deliberately named to mush together pretty much every trope that idols like to put forth) and then Minami joined, Lily made close friends with Miki, and Yuki’s friends Suzuka and Haruka came to visit as well.  Basically, Lily found herself quite enmeshed in the idol world, without actually becoming one herself.  That was a conscious decision on my part, her not becoming one, because I always wanted to be examining that world from the outside.

But what you may not know is that I know quite a bit about that world, and many of the events that occurred are taken directly from actual events that happened in the idol world.

A few examples:

• Yuki said that she had a concert in front of twenty thousand people where she wore a beautiful dress and couldn’t stop crying.  This was taken directly from the last eight minutes of Watanabe Mayu’s (an AKB48 idol) graduation.  It’s on Youtube.  It might make you cry.  Poor girl.
• Yuki also said that they put her in a bride’s outfit as a part of a variety show and had her fellow idols write her letters.  This was an episode of AKBingo.  I don’t know if the tears stopped when the cameras turned off, but it really wouldn’t surprise me at all.
• Minami sang her heart out on the live house’s stage and then ran to the back office where she sobbed her heart out.  This also happened on an episode of AKBingo, where a girl had to do a competition to star in “Wiz”.  She sang a song about going home, and put so much of herself into it that she ran out of the room and was sobbing her heart out.  I actually felt rather bad that the cameras followed her out and were being shoved in her face, but I guess that’s the nature of the business.

There were a few other situations that Lily and her idol friends found themselves in that closely tracked a lot of real life idol events.  Like, for example, when the idol group went to Houston, and they went around town getting footage of them having fun.  This was inspired heavily by Morning Musume’s trip to Houston in 2016 – the bonus DVD.

So I took a lot of inspiration from actual idol culture.  I’m not an idol and I’ve never even been to Japan, but I know enough about it that the inspiration was real and not just making stuff up.

The thing is, I actually feel really bad for idols.  I mean, I took great pains to not be too preachy about it in-story.  Yuki was always careful to say how she loved it as much as it hurt her, and all the other idols also had some really good memories and experiences of their time as an idol.  The point was never to be preachy about it.  I think ultimately, secondary to writing a good story, my hope was that an actual idol might read this and feel seen.  Like someone out there understand, even if a little bit, how terribly lonely they might feel.

I remember seeing a Youtube video of a Japanese idol, an AKB48 idol, who was sitting in her home in front of the computer crying about how she couldn’t afford chicken nuggets and matcha cookies.  She really wanted chicken nuggets and matcha cookies, and didn’t even have enough money for that.  I seem to remember that Lily even made an oblique reference to that at one point.  She was back to normal a couple of days later, but that’s always stuck with me.  Sometimes you just want chicken nuggets and matcha cookies, and it must feel awful to be such a beloved idol and not even have those basic, well, needs isn’t the right word, fulfilled.  It’s kind of a luxury, but such a small luxury that I feel so bad that she was so torn up about it.

Why do I feel so deeply and strongly about this?  I don’t know.  Maybe because I kind of understand, a little bit.  I know how it feels to have people claim to know you, but not be seen.  And that kind of thing – deep relationships – is not as common in Japanese culture as maybe it should be.

Everyone deserves to be seen… truly seen, I think.

Okay, now for some site news.

I have been working on this site.  Unfortunately, with 520,000 words spread across over a thousand diary posts, it is particularly difficult to manage, particularly because I need to go through and do some significant edits to it.  Not only are there spelling and grammar errors sprinkled throughout that probably significantly interfere with the Japanese translation, but there are times when I could have shown, not told.  Sometimes Lily talks about conversations she had with people, and it might be better if those conversations were recounted “verbatim” rather than recounted as a story after the fact.  I’m writing a wordpress plugin or two to help me with some of this, like the spelling errors, but the other things are systemic and will take me a long time to fix.  I have a vacation coming up and am blocking out a significant amount of time (amongst other projects and naps) to work on that.

As I mentioned in other places, too, I also removed all of the subscription stuff, and will be removing all references to it, probably this weekend.  Even when I started adding it, I was a bit torn, and I still am.  But at the end of the day, I decided that if it’s something I need to hide away, it’s not something that needs to be in the story, and it’s just not worth all the trouble.  It’s not so much that I’m ashamed of it, I’m not, but more that it just doesn’t fit what I want this story to be.  Lily’s human and never intended to be a virginal or Mary Sue character, but some things, I think, are best left to the imagination.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough of that for now.  As flawed as this story is, I think I will always consider it one of my greatest achievements, and I think I can make it even better.