Lilly & Avery Stories

The spark

In second grade, my daughter started writing short stories and came up with a character named Lilly—spelled L-I-L-L-Y, exactly the way she wanted it. Soon Lilly had a sister named Avery. I took their early sketches and ideas and started building out an entire universe around these two characters.

What it is

• A growing universe of original kids' stories featuring Lilly, Avery, and their world.
• Weekly audio episodes in the 15–30 minute range, recorded for my daughters to listen to at bedtime and on car rides.
• Illustrated scenes created with generative image tools, gradually evolving toward fully realized picture books.
• Experiments with sound design: some stories have custom soundtracks and effects, like a "laugh track" radio show complete with faux commercials.

Stack

• Image generation with Leonardo, DALL·E, and Sora for character concepts and scene art.
• ElevenLabs for narration, including the Voice Acting feature for more control over tone and delivery.
• Suno to generate custom music beds and theme snippets.
• Adobe Photoshop to tweak compositions, isolate characters, and blend scenes when the models don't get every detail right.
• v0, Cursor, and Cloud Code to design and build the front end.
• Vercel + Supabase to host the site and store story metadata.

What I learned

• Character consistency across models is hard. Details like "spotted right ear, solid black left ear" are easy to lose, and the more characters you add to a scene, the harder it gets.
• The best results come from a hybrid workflow: use AI to generate raw material, then rely on traditional digital art skills in Photoshop to fix details, remove or isolate characters, and recombine scenes.
• A weekly publishing cadence for my kids is a great forcing function—it keeps the universe evolving while also making me honest about what "good enough to ship" looks like in creative work.