When my younger daughter was two years old and we were in the car, she demanded that I sing. I obligingly burst into tune—only to be interrupted a few moments later. “No, Mommy. Sing song!”

That tells you everything you need to know about my musical talents.

Although I can’t hold a tune and my attempts to learn to play instruments were futile, music is important to me, and it plays important roles in my writing.

I often have music on in the background while I’m working. My usual playlists include punk, blues, world music, and dinosaur rock, but I’ll switch to something different to get in the mood for a particular story. For instance, my upcoming novella is set in Los Angeles in 1989, so while I was working on it I listened to a lot of late 80s top hits. Prince. Tears For Fears. B-52s. Billy Joel. Madonna. Fine Young Cannibals.

Even better, sometimes a particular song inspires a story. One afternoon a few years ago my Noisy Neighbor was blasting “Ode to Billie Joe”—and thus was born my novel Love Can’t Conquer. I have a big file full of story ideas, and quite a few of them came from songs. Someday I really want to write a story based on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” one of my favorite songs (I’m especially partial to Rufus Wainwright’s version). I’d also love to do a whole anthology with each story inspired by a different Johnny Cash tune. And then there’s the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” Rancid’s “Civilian Ways,” and Cosmo Jarvis’s “Gay Pirates.” So many possibilities!

And speaking of Johnny Cash, sometimes music appears in my stories to set a mood or tell you something about the characters. Cash shows up in Rattlesnake(along with Patsy Cline and a few others) because his songs fit the setting and the story so well. My novella Creature is set in the 1950s, so the hits of that era appear on radios and jukeboxes, helping teach the creature in question about the world. And if you know from the beginning of my Bones trilogy that Dylan listens to the Decemberists while Chris wears old Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts, doesn’t that show a bit of their conflict right there?

Now that I think about it, several of my protagonists are professional musicians, although Jory, Sky, and Jaxon experience that life in very different ways. In Jaxon’s book, I actually had the opportunity to write some song lyrics, which was really fun. The best part, though, was when Drew Bacca sang those lyrics when he narrated the book. That’s as close as I’ll ever get to creating music.

How does music interact with books for you? Do you listen while you read? Have you ever created a playlist for a particular book? Is there a song you think should inspire a story?

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Kim Fielding is the bestselling author of numerous m/m romance novels, novellas, and short stories. Like Kim herself, her work is eclectic, spanning genres such as contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and historical. Her stories are set in alternate worlds, in 15th century Bosnia, in modern-day Oregon. Her heroes are hipster architect werewolves, housekeepers, maimed giants, and conflicted graduate students. They’re usually flawed, they often encounter terrible obstacles, but they always find love.

After having migrated back and forth across the western two-thirds of the United States, Kim calls the boring part of California home. She lives there with her husband, her two daughters, and her day job as a university professor, but escapes as often as possible via car, train, plane, or boat. This may explain why her characters often seem to be in transit as well. She dreams of traveling and writing full-time.

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