The Lore of the Chaos Drops: Or, Why I Write Books Stoned

There are books I outline within an inch of their lives.

There are spreadsheets. Character bibles. Timelines. Family trees. Carefully plotted emotional arcs. Notes about where everyone is standing during a scene because God forbid somebody teleport across the room between paragraphs. I will research some microscopic detail that appears for three sentences like I am preparing to defend a doctoral dissertation on it.

And then there are the Chaos Drops.

The Chaos Drops were born because I got stoned and thought two cops were hot. That is essentially the lore. I suppose I could make it sound more sophisticated than that, but it would be a lie, and these books have never once pretended to be sophisticated.

It was early summer 2025. Golden hour. I was in bed, high, sending what my friends have come to know as my “stoned and alone” voice notes to our trio group chat. These are exactly what they sound like. I get stoned, my husband is otherwise occupied, and suddenly my friends receive a podcast they absolutely did not subscribe to.

Somewhere in the middle of that particular broadcast, my brain produced: “WHAT IF SHE GOT WITH TWO HOT COPS?”

And thus, Stevie Bishop entered the universe.

Was the original inspiration for Bennett and Cross perhaps two hot cops I had seen in real life? Maybe. Will I ever elaborate on that? Absolutely fucking not. That secret will die with me and the group chat. Alex and Mae can take it to my grave.

But the idea wouldn't leave me alone.

Suddenly there was this pink-haired Etsy shop owner living next door to two cops. She flirted with them. She got stoned and made things. She was horny. She was chaotic. She had approximately zero interest in behaving herself.

And somewhere during all of that, I realized I didn't just have a character. I had an alter ego.

Stevie Bishop is essentially my horny, stoned alter ego who was accidentally given her own book. And once Stevie existed, everything spiraled exactly as things tend to spiral around here.

I started writing Dial 911 for Orgasms, and I made myself one very important promise: I was not going to make it serious.

I wasn't going to turn it into another enormous project. I wasn't going to obsess over whether every chapter advanced a carefully constructed external plot. I wasn't going to build seventeen layers of symbolism and a family tree and a timeline dating back to somebody's great-grandfather's questionable business decisions in 1947.

There was barely going to be a plot. Actually, let's be accurate. The smut was the plot. Sometimes the plot was feelings. Mostly the plot was orgasms. And that was the entire fucking point.

I write dark books. I love writing dark books. I love complicated people making terrible decisions. I love morally questionable men. I love trauma and obsession and violence and fucked-up family dynamics and digging around inside characters until I find the ugliest thing they're hiding from themselves.

But writing dark things can also be heavy. I don't think we talk enough about that part of writing.

Yes, the characters are fictional. Yes, I know none of it is actually happening. But if I'm going to make a reader feel something, I have to go into that emotional place first. I have to sit inside a character's grief or fear or trauma long enough to figure out how it sounds. Sometimes I spend hours or days living inside scenes that are emotionally exhausting.

There are books I love writing that leave me feeling wrung the fuck out afterward. And apparently my brain eventually decided the cure was horny women making questionable decisions.

Fair enough.

The Chaos Drops became my palate cleanser. My little sweet treat. My breath of fresh, smutty air.

I usually write them at night, and I write a ridiculous amount of them on my phone. The house is quiet. I'm in bed. I've had a particularly delightful cookie or gummy. The day's responsibilities are finished—or at least I have decided they are no longer my problem—and I can just play.

That's the word for these books. Play.

I don't sit down thinking about whether the market needs this book. I don't worry whether somebody on TikTok is going to declare that books should have more plot this week after declaring books have too much plot last week. I don't worry about whether the story is profound enough.

I ask myself one very important literary question: Would this be hot and/or fucking hilarious?

Excellent. Proceed. And there is something incredibly freeing about giving myself permission to write that way.

Publishing can make you forget that writing is supposed to be fun.

Once writing becomes your career, creativity starts accumulating responsibilities. The story isn't just a story anymore. It's a product. It needs a cover. It needs editing. It needs formatting. It needs marketing. It needs metadata and graphics and release plans and promotional copy and seventeen other things that have absolutely nothing to do with sitting down and making imaginary people kiss.

Eventually you can start evaluating an idea before you've even had the chance to love it.

Can I sell this? Where does it fit in my brand? How long should it be? What tropes are in it? Will readers like it? Does it need a series? What does this do to my publishing schedule?

The Chaos Drops basically kick open the door and say: Shut the fuck up. She's horny.

It's wonderful. And somehow, despite my insistence that these books have no plot, those little assholes developed hearts anyway.

Because the women aren't just vehicles for sex.

They have anxiety. Depression. Heartbreak. Insecurities. Bad days. Complicated histories. Things they're trying to figure out about themselves. They make friends. They build this ridiculous little found family around one another.

So yes, on the surface, the Chaos Drops are unapologetically smutty. That's what you're here for. I'm not going to lure you into Dial 911 for Orgasms and then act shocked that you expected orgasms. The title has fulfilled its legal obligation to inform you of the situation.

But underneath all the sex and ridiculousness, there is something soft. There are women finding people who like them exactly as they are. There are friendships. There are feelings. There are little pieces of real life tucked between all the fucking.

I think that's why they became more important to me than I expected. They don't ask me to bleed for them. Some of my books do. The Chaos Drops ask me to come play. And sometimes, creatively, I need that.

I need to write something without wondering whether it is Important Literature™. I need to write a scene because it makes me laugh. I need to write characters who aren't currently destroying my emotional stability. I need to remember that not everything I create has to prove something about me as a writer.

Sometimes a book can exist because I had fun writing it and somebody else had fun reading it. That's enough. Actually, I think that's more than enough.

There is this weird pressure once you've been writing for a while to constantly become more serious. Bigger plots. Deeper themes. More intricate worlds. More emotionally devastating stories. Every new project is supposed to demonstrate growth somehow.

And I do want to grow. I want to write books that challenge me.

But growth can also mean learning that I don't have to turn every creative impulse into work. Sometimes protecting your creativity means letting part of it stay ridiculous.

Mine apparently wears pink, eats gummies, and has an alarming amount of sex. She contains multitudes.

And Stevie wasn't alone for long. The original Chaos Drop ladies became their own little lineup of beautiful disasters.

Stevie Bishop started everything with Dial 911 for Orgasms, because apparently two hot cops were all it took to create an entire publishing problem. Then came Goldie Leighton with Scouts Guide to Getting Wrecked. Sommer Soder followed with Bent for the Blueprint. And then Tate Winters arrived with Magna Cum Naughty.

Four women. Four books. Four different flavors of chaos. One increasingly questionable collection of notes on my phone. And the funniest part is that this whole thing exists because of one random thought during golden hour.

That's how ideas happen for me more often than I'd like to admit. There is rarely a dignified creative ritual. No candlelit writing room where I delicately place my fingers on the keyboard while the muse whispers literary brilliance into my ear.

Sometimes inspiration is beautiful. Sometimes inspiration is grief. Sometimes it's music or art or a place I've visited.

And sometimes inspiration is me lying in bed stoned, terrorizing the group chat with voice notes until I suddenly yell: WHAT IF SHE GOT WITH TWO HOT COPS?

Art. The human experience. So profound.

And yes, I know there are writers who absolutely cannot write stoned. Completely understandable. Sometimes I can't either.

There is a very specific sweet spot between my brain has stopped screaming and this is the funniest idea anyone has ever had and I have reread this sentence nine times and no longer understand the concept of language.

We respect the sweet spot.

I also don't think it magically makes me creative. The ideas are already there. If anything, sometimes being a little high gets my overthinking ass out of their way.

I'm a perfectionist. I can overthink a sentence into the ground. I can worry about whether something is good before I've even finished making it. I can edit myself while I'm drafting until I've sucked every ounce of joy out of the thing I was excited about ten minutes earlier.

The Chaos Drops don't really allow that. Especially when they're being drafted in bed on my phone while I'm stoned enough to think my own dialogue deserves an Academy Award.

Morning Lila can fix the commas. Nighttime Stevie has important work to do.

And sometimes morning Lila opens the document and thinks, What the actual fuck were you doing? But sometimes? That bitch cooked.

That's the magic of these books for me.

They aren't supposed to be everything. They don't need to be. They're fun. They're filthy. They're ridiculous. They're unexpectedly sweet. They're full of women dealing with real shit while also getting to experience pleasure and friendship and love and absolute nonsense. And they give the darker parts of my imagination somewhere to rest.

Maybe that's the real lore of the Chaos Drops.

They started as a joke. They became books. And somewhere along the way, they became one of the ways I protect the part of myself that still writes simply because writing is fucking fun.

No pressure. No existential crisis. No emotional excavation. Just me, my phone, a gummy, and whatever horny little plot bunny has decided to ruin my bedtime.

It's important for my creativity. It's genuinely important for my mental health. And I love these stupid fucking books.

So thank you, Stevie Bishop. Thank you, golden hour. Thank you to the two real-life hot cops whose identities will remain classified until every member of that group chat is dead.

And thank you to whatever was in that edible. You accidentally started a franchise.

xoxo,
Lila