The Plot Bunnies Are Winning

I have too many ideas.

This is not a humble brag. I am not sitting here delicately lamenting the terrible burden of creativity while a woodland creature braids my hair. I genuinely have too many fucking ideas, and sometimes it is exhausting.

I said I was going to slow down. I meant it. I am slowing down. I am trying to give books more time, give myself more time, stop treating my publishing schedule like I am personally responsible for keeping Amazon’s servers operational. I have spent enough years thinking that if I wasn’t constantly drafting, editing, releasing, promoting, or planning the next thing, I was somehow falling behind. I don’t want to work like that forever. I would actually like to enjoy the career I built instead of sprinting through it until someone finds me facedown on my keyboard with an unfinished sex scene open in Atticus.

Unfortunately, nobody informed my brain about the new policy.

I can slow down my publishing schedule. I cannot apparently slow down the plot bunnies. Those little assholes remain completely ungovernable.

They arrive at three in the morning. They arrive while I’m driving. They arrive when I’m supposed to be working on an entirely different book. They arrive while I’m scrolling TikTok, looking at a photograph, listening to music, having a conversation, reading about something completely unrelated, or minding my own fucking business in the grocery store. Sometimes it is an entire premise that appears almost fully formed. Sometimes it is one character. Sometimes it is a setting. Sometimes it is a single sentence that suddenly has a whole book attached to it. Sometimes I see something and my brain immediately goes, Okay, but what if there were murder and kissing?

And there goes my afternoon.

The worst ones are the ideas that refuse to remain ideas. They want infrastructure.

A normal person might write the premise in her notes app and continue with her day. I apparently need to name the characters, figure out where they live, determine what childhood trauma made them Like That, find their houses on Pinterest, decide what they drive, make a mood board, research an extremely specific occupation I knew nothing about forty-five minutes ago, and accidentally create a four-book series before dinner.

Occasionally I give the hypothetical series a pen name. This is where things really go off the rails.

Somewhere on my computer are names, logos, taglines, brand palettes, Canva folders, social-media graphics, and entire author identities for women who do not exist except for the unfortunate fact that they are all me. Some of them may eventually publish books. Some of them probably never will. Some were apparently created during a two-hour period when I became absolutely convinced I needed an entirely separate literary identity for a genre I had thought about writing for approximately six minutes.

There are abandoned pen names sitting in Canva like tiny author graveyards. Every once in a while I find one and think, Oh my God, I forgot about her.

Sorry, girl. You almost had a career.

The pen-name problem gets especially ridiculous because there is no consensus whatsoever about what authors are supposed to do with branding. Search for advice about pen names and you will immediately discover seventeen experts confidently giving you seventeen mutually exclusive answers. One will tell you that splitting your audience is career suicide and everything you write should live under one recognizable name. The next will tell you that readers need clear genre expectations and putting radically different books under one name will destroy your brand. Someone else says separate names for separate genres. Another says separate names only if the heat level changes. Another says your readership will follow you anywhere if they love your voice. Someone else says readers absolutely will not follow you and will become confused if your brand moves three inches to the left.

At some point I would like the publishing industry to hold a meeting and decide what the fuck I am supposed to do. Because I already have Lila.

Hi. It’s me.

Lila is the easiest one because Lila has had years to become a person. She has a voice, an audience, a visual identity, an increasingly absurd fictional universe, and enough books and future books to keep me busy for a very long time. I know what belongs to Lila because at this point Lila is less of a pen name and more of the author version of my actual brain with slightly better branding.

Then there is Ophelia Fox, whom I’ve started introducing people to because apparently one public author identity wasn’t enough. Ophelia makes sense to me. Her books feel different. Her voice feels different. Her world is softer and more lyrical and coastal and intimate in a way that deserves its own little corner instead of being shoved beneath the enormous neon sign hanging over everything Lila has become.

But Ophelia is not the only other name that has ever existed. There are others.

Some are still ideas. Some have works in progress attached to them. Some have branding. Some have entire futures I planned during what I can only assume was an unsupervised episode of creative mania. And some books are already out in the world under names where you could read the entire thing, close your Kindle, and never have the slightest fucking clue that Lila Grey wrote it.

Sometimes I want to tell everybody. There are moments when I want to stand on the internet and yell, THEY’RE ALL ME. IT’S ME. LILA. SURPRISE, BITCHES. Then I remember that I actually like the anonymity.

There is something wonderful about creating without every project immediately being attached to the expectations of an established name. A pen name can give a story room to become itself before anyone starts comparing it to everything else you’ve written. It lets me experiment. It lets me make something weird. It lets me walk into a different genre without dragging an entire catalog behind me.

There is freedom in nobody knowing. There is also the small logistical issue that every new pen name is apparently another business I have volunteered to run.

A name needs books. A name needs branding. Eventually it needs some combination of a website, newsletter, social media, graphics, reader expectations, marketing, release plans, and attention. Even if I keep everything beautifully simple, I am still one human being operating all of those identities. Ophelia cannot answer emails while Lila writes a book because, tragically, Ophelia and Lila share a nervous system.

This is the part my creative brain conveniently forgets while designing another logo. Ideas are infinite. Time is extremely fucking finite.

That might be the hardest thing for me to accept about having this kind of brain. I can think of stories faster than I can possibly write them. Even if I stopped getting new ideas tomorrow—which would apparently require either divine intervention or a medically concerning head injury—I already have enough existing projects to keep me writing for years.

And I mean years.

I have series I want to finish, books already promised to readers, stories I have been carrying around forever, new worlds I desperately want to explore, and random documents containing things like “HOT MAN + THING???” that Past Lila apparently believed would be perfectly understandable to Future Lila.

It was not. Thanks for nothing, babe.

The frustrating part is that I genuinely love these stories when they arrive. That's why they become plot bunnies instead of passing thoughts. For a little while, each new idea feels like the most exciting thing I have ever thought of. I can see it. I can hear the characters. I know exactly why I need to write it immediately, even while another manuscript is sitting open on my computer wondering where its author went.

Then another bunny hops in.

This is also how readers occasionally end up asking me the completely reasonable question of when they're getting more of something and I have to mentally flip through approximately four hundred filing cabinets before remembering what I once planned.

A reader can finish a book, fall completely in love with that world, and understandably want another one. Meanwhile I am standing three fictional universes away holding a new character like, Look what I found!

I know that can be frustrating. It frustrates me too.

I don't abandon stories because I stop caring about them. Usually the opposite is true. I care about too many of them at the same time. Every project is competing with another project I also desperately want to write, and there are only so many hours in a day before I need to perform annoying biological tasks like sleeping and eating.

Focus has never been my creative superpower. Imagination is. Those two things are not always friends.

For a long time, I thought the solution was simply to write faster. If I could release more books, I could catch up with my ideas. I could finish this series, then that one, then finally write the weird little thing in the folder, and eventually I would reach the end of the list.

This was adorable of me. There is no end of the list.

Every book I finish seems to produce three more ideas. Research for one project leads me somewhere interesting and suddenly that interesting thing needs its own story. A side character opens his mouth once and apparently requires a trilogy. I travel somewhere and want to set a book there. I learn about a bizarre piece of history and immediately need to ruin two fictional people's lives with it. I hear a song and accidentally invent a marriage in crisis.

I cannot outwrite my imagination. Trying to do that is probably one of the reasons I needed to slow down in the first place. So now I am trying to learn something I am historically terrible at: an idea does not have to become a book immediately to be worth having.

It can sit. It can wait.

I can write it down, save the inspiration, make enough notes that I understand what Past Lila was talking about for once, and leave it alone. I don't need to announce it. I don't need to put it on a publishing schedule. I definitely don't need to purchase a domain name before the characters have surnames.

And, Lila, if you're reading this later: you probably don't need another fucking pen name. (Probably. No promises.)

I'm also learning that not every idea needs to become anything at all. That one is harder. Creativity makes me want to preserve everything because abandoning an idea feels wasteful, especially when I once loved it enough to spend hours building it. But sometimes the purpose of an idea was simply to entertain me for an afternoon. Sometimes creating the world was the fun part. Sometimes I needed the mood board more than I needed the novel.

Maybe the Canva graveyard isn't actually a graveyard. Maybe it's a playground.

I tried something there. I made something because it delighted me. It doesn't have to generate revenue or become a twenty-year publishing plan to justify the time I spent creating it.

That is a strangely difficult thing to remember when creativity is also your career.

Once you make money from art, every creative impulse starts looking suspiciously like a potential product. This could be a book. This could be a series. This could be a new pen name. This could be content. This could be monetized. This could build another audience. Or it could just be fun.

I am trying very hard to let some things be fun again.

I'm also trying to accept that there will probably be stories I want to write that I never get to. I hate even typing that. There are only so many books one person can physically produce in a lifetime, and apparently my brain did not receive that limitation during manufacturing. If I am lucky enough to be writing when I'm eighty years old, I fully expect eighty-year-old me to have a notes app full of books she swears she'll get to eventually.

Honestly, she'll probably have another pen name. The logo will be gorgeous.

But maybe having more ideas than time isn't actually a problem I need to solve. Maybe it's just the kind of writer I am.

I'm not the author who has one perfectly organized five-year plan and calmly executes it without being distracted by a tattooed stranger who materialized in her imagination at 1:17 a.m. I have tried to be her. She seems lovely. I wish her tremendous success.

She is not me.

I am the author with too many folders, too many future series, too many imaginary people demanding custody arrangements for my attention, and apparently too many names. I am going to get distracted. I am going to occasionally disappear down a research hole and emerge with a new book I absolutely did not need. I am going to make Canva branding for projects that never see daylight. I am probably going to announce things and then take longer to write them than either I or my readers hoped.

I'm trying to get better at the parts of that I can control.

I'm trying to promise less before I know I can deliver it. I'm trying to give the stories already in front of me the attention they deserve instead of constantly chasing the newest shiny thing. I'm trying to remember that readers would probably rather wait for a book I loved writing than get one I forced myself through because an old schedule said I was supposed to.

Most of all, I'm trying to stop treating the endless stream of ideas as evidence that I am behind. I am not behind on stories I haven't written yet. They are simply stories I haven't written yet.

Some will become Lila books. Some will become Ophelia books. Some may belong to names you already know without knowing they're mine. Some might eventually force another poor woman into existence because apparently I have learned absolutely nothing. And some will live forever in a Canva folder with a gorgeous logo, an immaculate color palette, three character photos, and absolutely no manuscript.

That's okay too.

I said I was slowing down. I never said the plot bunnies agreed to it.

So for now, it's me, my unfinished manuscripts, my suspicious number of fictional identities, and an endless herd of tiny creative assholes against the world.

I'm trying my best. I'm writing my best. And if I accidentally create another pen name before this post goes live, everybody mind your fucking business.

xoxo,
Lila