I just finished writing a winter solstice novella in which the damp, chilly weather is an important plot point. I had to write about my character shivering, bundling up in warm clothing, drinking spiced cider and hot chocolate to get warm. Meanwhile, the temperatures where I live in California are hovering around the 100F mark.

The pathway from writing a story to publishing it can be long, even when it’s self-published. At a minimum, the story will need to go through a couple of rounds of line edits and a round or two of copy edits. It’ll need a cover, a blurb, a marketing plan of some kind. It will need to get into reviewers’ hands in time for them to read it before publication date. So that’s why I’ve been working on a winter holiday story in June and July.

An odd thing about be a writer is that you frequently have to mentally put yourself in situations very different from your physical one. My body is sitting at my kitchen table in front of a laptop, but my mind may need to be on a World War I battlefield, in a castle in an imaginary Central European country, or in a converted school bus in rural Southern Oregon.

This duality applies not just to weather, location, and time, but also to emotions. Maybe the real me is stressed because my country is a dumpster fire, my day job is having its disaster du jour, my family members are incapable of putting anything in the dishwasher, and my cat just puked on the carpet. But my characters? Maybe they’re right at the giddy, breathtaking brink of falling in love. I’m sitting, schlumpy in shorts and an ancient tee, with cookie crumbs down my front, a mosquito bite on my knee, and hair rapidly devolving into a multicolored Bozo effect. But my guys are dressed to the nines, sexy as hell. When they look at each other they have rainbows and sparkles in their eyes.

My point here is that writing requires more than imagination—it requires displacement. The writer must be someone she isn’t, in a place (and maybe time) she isn’t, feeling things she’s not. And that’s… a little weird. It can be incredibly difficult. For example, when I’m feeling very happy with my husband, who brought me lemon cake and did a beautiful job retiling the fireplace, I might have a hard time putting myself in the headspace of a character whose asshole of a boyfriend has just dumped him. And even if I can get into that headspace, it may have lingering effects so that I’m angry at my poor spouse just because a character is a jerk.

But this displacement can also be good. Just as reading can take us away from the cares and stresses of our everyday lives, so can writing. When I lose myself in my imaginary world, the real one drops away for a while. That’s a true relief when the real world isn’t looking very pretty. Or maybe I can just write a nice chilly scene to make the 100-degree temps feel less oppressive.

Do you ever feel a jolt when your stories and your life occupy very different spaces?

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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 family 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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