This blog began in 1997 as a single news page called Nucelus. In 2005, during a long wait to move into a new house, I decided to learn some php and MySQL and write my own blogging system, which became inkyBlog and which now powers this, my own Webbledegook blog.
Thank you to my brother, Murray Ewing, for help with some of the more challenging aspects!
Lady Lilian Catherine Scott Lawrence (to give her full name and title, though she squirms at being called Lady - see volume 2) has her origins in a script I wrote a few months before I started The Rainbow Orchid, in 1996, in a story called 'Stage Fight'. In that she was called Lily Lowell, a cast member in a terrible melodramatic play that becomes a hit when the two male leads, both sweet on Lily, have their off-stage antagonism spill over into their performances. Another character in that script was one Evelyn Saxon, who would morph into Evelyn Crow for Orchid. I later adapted this story to fit in to the Julius Chancer universe and it appeared as a Lily Lawrence 'origin story' of sorts, called 'Sword of Fate', appearing in The Girly Comic issue 5 back in 2004. A shorter Lily origin (4 panels long) appears in The Rainbow Orchid volume 2
So, what do we know about Lily? She is the daughter of Lord Reginald Tybalt Stone Pritchard Lawrence and Ann Blyth McKay (deceased) and had a brother, Peter Stone Scott Lawrence, who was killed on the Western Front in 1916. She ran away from home to become a stage actress and then ran away from that, to America, where she eventually became a film star at United Players.
Visually Lily took a little while to come through. At first she was too tom-boyish, though I didn't want her to be too 'girly' either. The inspiration for clinching her look came when I saw a photograph of a young Coco Chanel, though she changed more from that point on. Lily has the most complicated hair style and I still sometimes struggle to get it right!
Below is an early watercoloured drawing of Lily, from 1997, and one of the scrapbook pieces I came up with for volume 1 in 2009, Lily on the cover of Picture Show magazine.