I had a thought tonight, somewhere in the second period, and now I can’t stop thinking it, so you’re all going to have to think it with me.
Every time I sit down to watch hockey, my hockey boys and girls are watching it too.
Not in a spooky way. Well. Maybe a little bit in a spooky way. It’s Halloween, I’m allowed.
But think about it. Everything my players know about hockey, they know because I know it. When I learn something new about a breakout or a forecheck or why a coach pulled the goalie with three minutes left, they learn it at exactly the same moment. Their hockey brains are my hockey brain, wearing different jerseys. If I’ve never noticed something, neither have they. If I yell at the TV about a missed call, somewhere in Portland an entire locker room is yelling with me.
Which means my players are only ever as smart as I am. And I’d like that to sound less alarming than it does.
Then it got worse. Or better. I genuinely can’t decide.
Because it isn’t just what they know. It’s who they look up to. My players grew up watching the same players I watch. The rookies in the PHL have heroes, and their heroes are my heroes. Somewhere in my universe there’s a kid who taped a poster of a big, grumpy enforcer with a soft heart to his bedroom wall, and I know exactly who he was thinking of when he did it, because I was thinking of him too. Somewhere there’s a centre who watched a misunderstood ginger find his way home and decided that’s the kind of veteran he wants to be one day.
They’re not just playing hockey. They’re trying to become the players I love. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.
I sat with that for a while, and I think I’ve landed somewhere a bit softer than scary.
Because isn’t that just what happens to every hockey kid? Every player who’s ever laced up grew up watching someone. They learned the game from the people they loved watching it with. They copied the celly, the stick tap, the way their hero leaned on the boards. My players just happen to have learned it all from someone sitting on a couch at the bottom of the world, at strange hours, in her pyjamas, with a cat judging her.
So yes, my players’ hockey knowledge is exactly as deep as mine. They’ll make the same mistakes I make, love the same underdogs, and hold the same grudges against certain referees. (They know which ones.)
But they also love the game the way I love it. And honestly? I can’t think of anything better to give them.
Of course, there’s a small complication on the horizon. In December I’m heading off on my hockey research trip (and yes, it is research, I have a notebook and everything), which means for the first time a lot of what I learn won’t come through a TV screen at strange hours. It’ll come from real arenas, real ice, real noise, and real people who know far more than I do.
Which means my players are about to get considerably more knowledgeable, very quickly. About what they can and can’t do. About what they can and can’t get away with. About exactly how close to the line a person can skate before somebody in a striped shirt notices.
I’m a little worried about what they’ll do with all that. They’re already trouble. Informed trouble is a whole new level.
In the meantime, I just need to keep watching. For their sake, you understand. Purely professional.
On ginger beards, bad reputations, and the big man who finally found his way home
I want to start by saying I have tried to be objective about this. I really have. I’ve sat down, cup of tea in hand, and asked myself the hard questions. Is it fair to love a hockey player this much based largely on his name, his beard, and the general impression that he could carry a sofa up three flights of stairs without complaint?
And the answer, after careful and rigorous consideration, is yes. Yes it is. Next question.
Let’s start with the name, because honestly, I have to. Pierre-Luc Dubois. Say it out loud. Go on, I’ll wait. That is not a name. That is a back-cover blurb. That is a man who owns a sugar shack in the Laurentians and is very gruff with the heroine when her car breaks down in a snowstorm outside his property, right up until chapter nine when he quietly fixes her heater and doesn’t mention it. I have named a frankly alarming number of hockey players across the PHL and I’m not sure I’ve named a single one as perfectly as his parents managed on the first go. I’m a little bit annoyed about it, if I’m honest. Professionally.
Then there’s the rest of the package. He’s a ginger with a beard. He’s huge. Not Tom Wilson huge (nobody is Tom Wilson huge, Tom Wilson is a weather event), but big enough that when things get spicy in the corners he can absolutely mix it up, and big enough that the boards make a very satisfying noise when he’s involved. He skates like someone who has made peace with the laws of physics by simply ignoring them.
So yes. The aesthetics are strong. But that’s not actually why I love him.
* * *
Here’s the bit that gets me.
When the Caps traded Darcy Kuemper to the Kings for Pierre-Luc back in the summer of 2024, the reaction wasn’t exactly a ticker-tape parade. If you spent any time in the comments sections (and I did, because I am a glutton for punishment), the word that kept getting thrown around was “cancer.” Locker room cancer. Doesn’t fit. Never fits. Look at his record.
And to be fair to the internet, which is not a sentence I write often, the record was there. Drafted third overall by Columbus in 2016. Moved on from Columbus. Moved on from Winnipeg. Signed an eight-year deal in Los Angeles, had the quietest season of his career, sixteen goals and forty points, and was moved on again after one year. Three teams, three exits, and a story that had pretty much been written for him by people who had never been in a room with him.
I write romance. I know exactly what that story is. It’s the backstory of every hero who walks into chapter one with his walls up and his jaw tight, and everyone in town has an opinion about him before he’s said a word.
And I also know how that story is supposed to go.
* * *
He got to Washington and the Caps said the thing that, apparently, nobody had said to him in a while. Pierre-Luc put it simply afterwards: they told him to be himself, and they’d give him a chance. He said the players welcomed him “like a brother” from day one.
And then he went out and had the best season of his career. Twenty goals, forty-six assists, sixty-six points, all career highs, while Spencer Carbery threw him over the boards night after night against the other team’s best line. Big, heavy, responsible, the sort of player who does the unglamorous work and makes everyone around him better. He anchored a line with Tom and Big Pro that was frankly unfair to look at, let alone play against.
At the end of that season he said it was “the most fun I’ve had playing hockey.” He said the group’s enthusiasm was contagious. He said, of Washington, “It feels like home.”
Reader, I had to put the phone down for a minute.
Because that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the whole thing. The “locker room cancer” wasn’t a cancer at all. He was a man who’d never been in the right room. Some people aren’t difficult. They’re just in the wrong place, with the wrong people, being asked to be someone they’re not. Put them somewhere they’re wanted and watch what happens.
That’s not a hockey story. That’s a found family story. And you all know how I feel about those.
* * *
Of course, because this is the Caps and nothing is ever allowed to be simple, last season was cruel to him. He went down on Halloween 2025 against the Islanders, stayed down after a faceoff, and needed surgery on his abdominal and adductor muscles a week later. He didn’t play again until February. The man who’d just felt at home for the first time in his career had to spend months watching from the press box, in the gym, in the no-contact jersey. If I’d written that I’d have had readers in my inbox.
When he finally came back against Nashville, he scored. Of course he did. First game back, first period, right after Tom opened the scoring. I’d like to tell you I handled that with dignity. I did not.
He was in and out a bit after that and the season never quite let him find his feet. But this year he came into camp and Tom, Tom, called him the fittest guy on the team and said he looked “phenomenal.” He’s been banged up again to start the season (because the hockey gods are petty) but he’s back now, picking up points, setting up Big Pro for a game-winner against Philly this week like he never left.
And today is Halloween. A year to the day since the injury. I’m choosing to take that as a sign the curse is broken and we’re into the redemption arc now. You can’t stop me.
* * *
So here’s my case, laid out plainly for anyone still on the fence.
He has a name that belongs on a cover. He has a beard that belongs on a cover. He’s big, he’s heavy, he’s smart, and he does the work no one claps for. He spent years being told he was the problem, and it turned out all he needed was a team that let him be himself. And the moment he got one, he slotted straight in like he’d always been there, one of the veterans the room leans on and the fans adore.
I loved him from the first mention of him being ours. Not because I knew how it would turn out, but because I’ve been doing this long enough to recognise a hero when he walks into chapter one with everyone already sure they’ve got him figured out.
They didn’t. We did.
Welcome home, PLD. Stay forever, please. I’m sure there’s room on Tom’s line and in my heart. Mostly the second one.
— Bella
P.S. Is he going in a book? Well. I’m just going to say that if you’ve spent any time with Per and Berg Worth, and you’ve noticed how phenomenal those two are, how big and steady and quietly devoted to the people who let them in, you may have already met a little more of Pierre-Luc than I’ve ever officially admitted to. More than a little, if I’m honest. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying I’ve been watching a lot of Caps hockey, and the Worth boys have been paying attention too.
The first in a little series introducing the real-life hockey players who live rent-free in my head (and, let’s be honest, occasionally wander into my manuscripts).
Hello, lovelies.
You’ve heard me carry on about my hockey boys for long enough that it’s about time I properly introduced you. So I’m starting a little series, one player at a time, and there was never any question about who was going first.
Tom Wilson. Number 43. Washington Capitals. My hockey hero, and he has been since his very first season.
The kid who walked in
The Caps drafted him sixteenth overall in 2012, a big lad from Toronto standing six foot four, and he got his first taste of NHL hockey in three playoff games before he’d even played a regular-season one. Then came the rookie year: all 82 games, three goals, seven assists and 151 penalty minutes.
Those numbers tell you exactly what they wanted him to be. The goon. Fourth-line minutes, drop the gloves with anyone who looked at you sideways, hit everything that moved. And he did what he was asked, because he was so young and so eager and so desperate to belong.
But he was also a kid a long way from home, and that’s the bit that got me. He roomed with Michael Latta, and I can tell you the exact moment I fell. It was the 24/7 special they film every year in the lead-up to the Winter Classic, the year the Caps played the Blackhawks outdoors at Nationals Park on New Year’s Day 2015. In one episode the cameras followed the boys home, and there were Tom and Latta pushing a trolley round the supermarket, then showing off a fridge that was absolutely full of ketchup. Just ketchup, as far as I could tell. They were so young and so earnest, and so competitive about something as silly as the shopping, that I sat there grinning at my screen and thought, oh no. That one. He’s mine now.
Later he roomed with Andre Burakovsky, and if you were around for that era you’ll remember it fondly. The great hulking enforcer on the ice who, off it, turned out to be a big soft thing who’d happily curl up with Harry Potter. Readers, I was done for. If you’ve ever wondered where some of my Pioneers get their marshmallow centres, now you know.
Growing into the A
I won’t pretend he was a saint. There were suspensions, a few of them deserved, and for a stretch his name was a lightning rod for every hockey argument on the internet. Plenty of players never get past that reputation.
Tom did. He kept the edge, because the edge is part of who he is, but he cleaned up the hits that crossed the line and quietly turned himself into a genuine top-line forward the Caps trust in every situation. Have a look at this: as a rookie he racked up 151 penalty minutes and scored three goals. Last season he had 117 penalty minutes and scored thirty. That’s not a goon. That’s a hockey player.
He’s worn the A on his chest for years now, and Connor McDavid (yes, that one) has called him a god on the forecheck. I may have screamed.
2018 Stanley Cup run: 21 games, 5 goals, 10 assists, 15 points
2024–25: career highs of 33 goals and 65 points
2025–26: 30 goals and 32 assists for 62 points in 72 games, his second straight 30-goal season
Career (through 2025–26): 907 games, 209 goals, 248 assists, 457 points and 1,649 penalty minutes
Contract: signed in Washington through 2030–31
The last of 2018
June 2018. The Caps finally, finally lifted the Cup in Las Vegas, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier about something that happened on the other side of the planet in the middle of my day.
Of the boys who won it that night, only two are still wearing the red: Tom and Ovi. When John Carlson was traded to Anaheim last March, Tom got teary talking about him in front of the cameras, and so did I, sitting on the couch with a can of coke going warm in my hand.
And now Ovi has told the team this season will be his last. Which means that next year, Tom will be the only one left. The last link to the Cup. The kid they tried to make a goon, standing in the room as the one who remembers what it took.
Everyone in Washington seems to think the C is his next. I’m trying not to get my hopes up. I am failing. Captain of the new boys, the ones who’ve never lifted it yet? I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see wear it.
Coming up
Next time I’ll introduce you to a few more of my favourites: Pierre-Luc Dubois, Logan Thompson, and Big Pro and Little Pro, the Protas brothers. Bring snacks.
Let me start with a confession. When we first started planning this trip, I was very, very sensible about it.
It was a research trip. Capital R. I write hockey romance, and I’ve written a lot of it — whole teams, whole families, whole universes of men who skate fast and feel things deeply — and almost all of it has been built from my couch in Tasmania, watching games at ungodly hours with a blanket, a cup of tea and the cats judging me. I know the rules. I know the rhythms. I know what a good line change looks like. But I have never actually sat in an arena and felt one.
I wanted to know what the cold coming off the ice smells like. How loud it gets when the home team scores, and how quiet it gets when the visitors do. What the concourse sounds like between periods. Whether you can hear the skates from the stands. The little things. The things that make a reader go, oh, she’s been there.
So: research. Very professional. Tax-deductible-adjacent.
And, fine, there was one other thing on the list. A bucket list thing. His name is Tom Wilson.
Tom Wilson is my hockey hero, and I will not be taking questions. On the ice he is a big, aggressive mountain of Canadian man, the kind of player who makes opposing forwards quietly reconsider their life choices. Off the ice he’s the softie who reads Harry Potter by wand light. If I wrote him into a book, my editor would tell me he was too much. Nobody would believe it. That’s exactly why I love him, and he’s the reason I wanted to be in the building. That was the original plan. Watch Willy play. Maybe cry a little. Go home happy.
Then there’s the supporting cast, because I am a Caps girl down to my bones and I have favourites. Pierre-Luc Dubois, my other favourite forward. Logan Thompson in goal. The Outlaw. Josie. And the Pro brothers, Big Pro and Little Pro, Aliaksei and Ilya Protas, who are the only men on earth who can make Tom Wilson look small. I’ve seen it happen. It’s unsettling. It’s like watching a mountain stand next to two bigger mountains and suddenly look like a hill. A whole roster of men I’ve yelled at, cheered for and adopted from the other side of the world at three in the morning, and I was going to get to see every one of them in person.
And Ovi? Ovi was the bonus. The cherry on top. Getting to say I’d been in the same building as Alex Ovechkin, a fixture of my hockey life for so long that it felt a bit like planning to go and meet a weather system.
So we built the trip around the Capitals. Three games, three Canadian cities, one long, slightly unhinged road trip in December. Edmonton first. Then the drive down to Calgary to see them at the Saddledome, in its very last season, which felt like history all on its own. Then the big haul back west to Vancouver for the last game before we fly home. I bought thermals. I bought more thermals. I have been informed, by people who live in actual snow, that I still have not bought enough thermals.
And then Ovi announced his retirement.
I’m not going to pretend I took it with grace. There may have been a noise. Possibly a word I don’t put in my books. Because just like that, the bonus became the whole thing. I still love Willy. He’s still my guy. But the trip I’d been calling research has turned into something else entirely. It’s not the research trip anymore. It’s the Ovi Farewell Tour. Three chances to watch one of the greatest goal scorers the game has ever known, in what is now his final season, and I get to be in the building for three of them. I didn’t plan that. Nobody plans that. The timing just landed in my lap like a puck off a lucky bounce.
Here’s the thing, though. From the outside, this probably looks like a fan going on a holiday to watch some hockey. And it is that. I’m not going to dress it up. I am going to scream. I am going to buy merch I do not need. I am going to spend three entire games trying very hard not to cry every time number eight touches the puck, and I am going to fail. Probably during warm-ups. Possibly before we even find our seats.
But it’s so much more than it looks.
It’s the first time I’ll be standing in the world I’ve spent years writing. Every rink I’ve ever built on the page, every locker room, every press box and bench and tunnel — I’ve imagined all of them. Now I get to check my work. I get to find out what I got right and, more importantly, what I got wrong, and what I never even knew to wonder about. My Pioneers and my McKenzies and all their messy found families are going to be better for it. I can already feel the books shifting.
It’s also a trip I’m taking with people who matter. My writing partner and I have been making stories together since around 1998 — we’ve been doing this longer than some of my characters have been alive — and for the first time we’ll be making them in the same country, in the same car, on the same long icy highways. I don’t expect we’ll get many words written. I do expect we’ll plot out loud for hours, argue about who gets hurt, and come home with more ideas than we can possibly use. And the most important part? Jo is coming too, which means someone will be sensible about dinner and someone will remember where we parked. She’s dealt with my obsession for so long I’m pretty sure that we now share obsessions, right down to Big Willy.
And it’s about time. Not in the ‘it’s about time I did this’ sense, although yes, also that. I mean time itself. How you can follow a player for years, through every season and every playoff heartbreak and every record, and think of him as permanent. And then one day there’s an announcement, and you realise you were watching an ending the whole time, you just didn’t know which chapter you were in.
I write happily-ever-afters for a living. I believe in them, deeply. But I also know that the best endings are the ones you get to witness. You get to be there. You get to say goodbye properly, instead of reading about it the next morning over toast.
So that’s what this is now. Part research trip. Part bucket list. Part pilgrimage. Part three friends and a hire car versus the Canadian winter. And part a very grateful fan getting to stand up, three times, and say thank you to a player who gave her years of joy from the other side of the world.
I’ll report back. With notes. With photos. With, almost certainly, more feelings than is strictly professional.
Right, hockey people, it’s time for an update, because I have officially stopped pretending this trip is theoretical. It is 71 days away. There is a jersey. This is happening.
For anyone new here: I write hockey romance, which means every so often the research has to get a little more hands-on than a stats page and a highlight reel, and this December I am doing exactly that. Call it a research trip. Call it an excuse. I’m calling it both and I’m not sorry.
Here’s the run of it. We fly into Vancouver on November 30th. From there we’re driving up to Edmonton, across to Calgary, and back down to Vancouver, and along the way we’re catching three games — the Capitals against the Oilers in Edmonton, then the Capitals against the Flames in Calgary, then the Capitals against the Canucks back in Vancouver, in that order. Rink to rink, city to city, three very different arenas and hopefully three very good games. We fly home on December 8th.
Logistically, I feel disgustingly prepared. The jersey’s sourced. I’ve actually sorted clothing for the temperature swing between three different Canadian cities in December, which for anyone who knows how I pack is basically a miracle worth documenting. Layers upon layers upon layers, ready to go.
And because apparently I need a wishlist for absolutely everything, here’s the non-hockey one: the Rockies scenery is a given, since we’re driving straight through the middle of it, so that one barely counts. What I actually want is a moose, and I wouldn’t say no to a wolverine or a beaver if one wanted to make an appearance. What I do not want is a bear — that feels like a lot, intensity-wise, and I’m choosing to believe they’re all doing their best Yogi impression and sleeping the whole thing off somewhere I can’t see them. Mostly, though, I’m hoping for a squirrel or two. My spirit animal is a squirrel, which — if you know me, you already know exactly why that tracks.
On the writing side: there are eight books finished and waiting in the wings, but I’m not trying to push all of them out the door at once just to hit a deadline I set for myself. Three feels like the right number to have properly alive in the universe by the time we leave — real, out, findable — and the rest can follow at their own pace rather than mine panicking them into existence. I’m even toying with packing a couple of print copies to hand out at the arenas, if that’s a thing I’m allowed to do. Fingers crossed on that one.
Once we’re actually there, I’m hoping to update here every single day — rink notes, road notes, whatever nonsense happens in the car between Edmonton and Calgary. No promises on how coherent those updates will be after three games in a week, but I’ll do my best.
And look, if I come home with a game puck and an unreasonable amount of maple candy, I will consider this trip an unqualified success on every possible front.
I can also already see an abundance of waffles, maple syrup, poutine, and Nanaimo bars in my future. Not all on the same plate, obviously. I have some standards. Are there other Canadian Delicacies I should seek out? Beaver tails and Butter Tarts maybe?
There is a version of the protective character that I think gets written more than it should — the one who throws himself in front of danger, who takes the hit, who stands between the person he loves and whatever catastrophic thing is bearing down on them. Dramatic. Cinematic. Occasionally genuinely moving.
But that is not, I would argue, why protective characters actually work.
That is not why we fall for them.
We fall for them because of the other thing. The small thing. The thing that costs nothing except attention and communicates everything.
The walking on the gutter side of the footpath.
If you know, you know — and if you’ve ever walked beside someone who quietly repositioned themselves so they were between you and the traffic without making anything of it, without announcing it or expecting acknowledgement, you know exactly what I mean when I say that small gesture lands harder than any dramatic sacrifice. It is not about the cars. It has never been about the cars. It is about the fact that someone is thinking about you, specifically, in the small and constant way that love actually looks like in real life.
Hold that thought. That is the whole thesis.
The umbrella tilted toward you in the rain while they get rained on. The hand that appears at the small of your back in a crowd, not possessively, just — I know where you are, I have you. The coffee that appears on your desk because they noticed you hadn’t eaten. The door they get to first. The coat they put around your shoulders before you’ve realised you’re cold.
None of these things require heroism. All of them require the same thing, which is paying attention. Which is caring enough about one specific person to notice what they need before they name it, and then quietly providing it without requiring a medal for the effort.
That is what Deacon Worth does. Not perfectly — he is a Worth, which means he is also occasionally overprotective in the ways that require a conversation, and Kon has opinions about this and is not shy about sharing them. But underneath all of that, underneath the big gestures and the hard moments, Deke is a man who notices. Who repositions himself between Kon and the cold wind without thinking about it. Who tracks where Kon is in a room not out of possession but out of the same instinct that makes you keep half an eye on the person you love in a crowd, just to know they’re there and fine and not needing you for anything but available to need you if they do.
That is the protective character that works. Not the one with the heroic sacrifice — or not only that one, not only in the dramatic moment. The one who has quietly decided that your comfort and safety and ease are worth their ongoing attention. The one for whom protection is not an event but a habit, built so deeply into how they love that they don’t even notice they’re doing it half the time.
We notice, though.
Readers notice. Because most of us have been cold in a crowd and wished someone would put a coat around our shoulders. Most of us have walked on the traffic side ourselves and wondered what it would feel like if someone just, without comment, moved us gently to the inside.
What you’re looking at — if you’ve scrolled down to the images I’ve attached to this post, and I hope you have — is the Professional Hockey League. The PHL. Men’s league, women’s league, full team rosters of logos, jerseys, and mascots for every franchise in both competitions.
Portland Pioneers. Seattle Sirens. San Francisco Golden Gate. San Diego Wave. All the way through to Charlotte Fury and Kansas City Heartland and everyone in between.
Every team has a logo. Every team has a home jersey. Every team has a mascot with a name — and I want to take a moment to appreciate that the Portland Pioneers’ mascot is called Dusty and he is wearing a cowboy hat, and the Nashville Sound’s mascot is a purple musical note called Pick, and the Dallas Queens have a horse in a crown called Queenie, and I love all of them unreasonably.
Now. Here is the thing I need to address directly.
I am, in my books, currently using three of these teams.
Three.
Out of thirty-two in the men’s league and sixteen in the women’s league. I have built forty-eight teams — complete with branding, mascots, staff rosters, full operational crews, support staff, back office personnel, and arena teams — and I am, at present, using three of them with any regularity.
Is this crazy?
I have been asked this question, mostly by myself at two in the morning, and I want to give you my honest answer.
No. It is not crazy. It is thorough research, and I will tell you why.
The PHLu exists as a universe, not a backdrop. When Deacon Worth skates out onto the ice in Portland, he is not skating into a vague gesture at a hockey league. He is skating into something real — real in the way that matters for fiction, which is to say internally consistent, fully populated, and detailed enough that I know exactly what the rivalry history is between the Pioneers and the Seattle Sirens, why the Las Vegas Aces have the reputation they do, and what it means for a player to be traded to the Austin Capitals versus the New York Empire. I know the arena staff by name. I know who runs the back office. I know the mascots and what they mean to their home crowds.
And that last part matters more than it might seem.
When a character gets traded — when someone leaves the team they’ve bled for and shows up in a different dressing room, a different jersey, a different city — that transition has weight. Real weight. I know exactly what colours they’re leaving behind and exactly what colours they’re pulling on for the first time. I know what their old mascot looked like and what the new one means to the fans in that arena. If a character hands a kid a puck with their old team’s mascot on it in a quiet moment of goodbye, I know what that mascot is. I don’t have to make it up on the spot or leave it vague or hope the reader doesn’t notice the gap. It’s there. It’s real. It’s Dusty or Cinder or Bolt or Surge, and it means something specific because the whole universe means something specific.
That is what the worldbuilding is for. Not the parts that end up on the page explicitly — but the parts that make everything on the page feel true.
None of it ends up in the text in any heavy-handed way. You will not read a chapter in which I pause to describe Jackpot the Las Vegas Aces mascot in loving detail. That is not what this is for.
What it is for is the texture. The specificity. The particular quality of a fictional world that has been thought through rather than sketched — the kind of world where a character can make a throwaway comment about another team and it lands as true because it is true, within the logic of the universe, because I actually know the answer.
I’ll also be honest about something else, because I think honesty is earned here: some of my logos will look familiar to hockey fans. There are only so many ways to put a letter in a shield or a flame around an animal before things start to rhyme with something already out there in that other league. I know this. These logos live in my blog and in my head and almost certainly nowhere else, and I’m at peace with that. They needed to exist. Not for the world — for me. For the integrity of this universe I have been building, which required real teams with real identities rather than placeholders with vague colour schemes.
This is my hockey world. I built it from the ice up. And my hope — my genuine, slightly sleep-deprived hope — is that the more I have already built it, the more you will love it too. That when you read about the Pioneers you will feel the weight of a real franchise behind them. That when a character bleeds in that jersey it will mean something, because you know what that jersey looks like and what it stands for and who else has worn it before them.
Romance has changed. I have been reading it long enough to say that with some authority, and I am glad of it in ways that are difficult to fully quantify.
When I started reading romance the template was fairly fixed. The men were alpha — dominant, certain, occasionally insufferable about it — and the women were strong in the ways that were permitted, which is to say strong enough to be interesting but not strong enough to meaningfully challenge the architecture of the story. Everyone knew their place. Everyone stayed in their lane. The emotional landscape was, by modern standards, a fairly narrow one.
What we write now — what the best of the genre is doing now — is something altogether more honest than that. And Isolated is my attempt to do the most honest version of it I know how to do.
Kon is a young Russian man who ran from his home country to save his own life. Whether that is a perfectly rational assessment of his situation or not is almost beside the point — it is what he believed, with every cell in his body, and that belief drove every decision he made. He fled something real. He carries that flight with him. And on top of that weight, on top of the fear and the displacement and the sheer enormity of starting over on a different continent, he is in love with a man he first watched — first wanted, if we’re being honest, because Kon has always been honest with himself even when it terrified him — while he was still a minor. He arrived in America raw and open and frightened in ways he would never fully name, and he needed, perhaps more than he needed anything else, to be safe.
And then there is Deke.
Deacon Worth has been beaten for who he is. Not metaphorically — physically, by people who suspected what he was before he had even found the words for it himself. He came out anyway. He became, almost without trying, the league’s poster boy for inclusivity — which is its own complicated thing to carry, being someone’s symbol, being the face of something larger than yourself when all you really wanted was to be allowed to exist without apology.
And then he falls in love with Kon.
Two people, both of whom have learned — through completely different routes, at completely different costs — that the world is not automatically safe for who they are. Two people who have every reason to keep their walls up and protect what’s tender in them and never, ever let anyone close enough to use it against them.
What they build together is not a grand gesture. It’s not a declaration or a rescue or a dramatic moment of surrender. It is something quieter and harder and more valuable than any of those things.
It is emotional safety. The real kind. The kind that gets built slowly, in small increments, through a hundred moments of choosing to be honest when dishonesty would have been easier. Through Deke learning that his strength does not require Kon’s smallness. Through Kon learning that vulnerability offered to the right person is not weakness — it is the bravest thing he has ever done, and he has done genuinely brave things. Through both of them, gradually, learning to be held.
That is what romance can do now that it couldn’t always do. It can show us people who are not performing their gender or their strength or their certainty. It can show us men — complicated, scared, hopeful, real men — learning to be emotionally safe with each other. Learning that love is not a transaction or a conquest or a lane you stay in.
Learning that the softest parts of them are not the parts that need protecting.
Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours, give or take, depending on what time you’re reading this and whether my grasp on the space-time continuum holds up, which frankly I wouldn’t bet on right now.
Isolated releases in two weeks and I have feelings about this. I have so many feelings about this that they have taken up all available storage space and are now apparently spilling out into a blog post at — I’m not going to tell you what time it is. It’s fine. Everything is fine.
Here is what I know: I am confident about this book.
I want to say that clearly and mean it, because it’s true and because I think it matters to say true things even when the rest of your brain is staging a complete carnival. Deacon Worth and Konstantin Andropov are two of my favourite people — not characters, people, because if you’ve been here for five minutes you know that’s how this works — and I have given them everything I have.
But I want to tell you something about how long this has actually been.
That’s when Kon first came to me. Fifteen years ago. Fifteen years of knowing the Worth family, of knowing beautiful, complicated, resilient Kon — which means that what you’re getting in two weeks is not a book I wrote recently and released into the world while the ink was still metaphorically drying. It is fifteen years of a person becoming fully himself on the page.
When Kon first arrived he was already carrying so much. He was being beaten by his father back in Russia. He was trapped inside a system that outed him at a team function — not his choice, not his moment, just the world deciding it owned something that was his to give — and his father’s response was to send him away to the US with bruises and a message that he was a disappointment. Not that he was dead to him. Not quite that. But that he had failed some fundamental expectation, and that was that.
That is where Kon begins. That is what he is carrying when he meets Deke.
And then he keeps going. Because that is what Kon does — he keeps going, through everything, changing and growing and finding himself in ways that fifteen years of writing him have let me witness like watching someone you love become more fully who they were always supposed to be. He has been through so much since those early days. He has shed things and gained things and broken and healed and I have been there for every version of him, and every version has mattered.
I know him down to the marrow. I know what Deke’s hand on his face means to someone who learned early that hands could hurt. I know what as equals costs him to say and what it costs Deke to hear. I know the specific quality of Kon’s courage, which is not the loud kind but the kind that keeps going quietly in the dark without any guarantee of light at the end.
I believe in this book completely.
I am also nervous as absolute hell and I cannot find the off switch for that particular feeling no matter where I look.
And I’ve decided that’s okay. Confidence and nerves are not opposites. They live together, apparently — the confidence saying this is real and it’s good and people are going to feel it, and the nerves trailing off into a low ambient frequency of but what if that doesn’t really resolve into words. I’ve been trying to reign the nerves in for two weeks and I’m done. They have unpacked. They have booked the full fortnight. I’m going to let them stay and focus instead on the thing that matters more.
Somewhere out there are readers who don’t know yet that Kon exists. Who don’t know about the boy who was beaten and outed and sent away and chose, anyway, to hope. Who don’t know what it looks like when fifteen years of knowing someone finally gets to become a book.
I cannot wait for them to know.
Two weeks. I’ll be over here, alternating between serene certainty and low-grade chaos, if anyone needs me.
There is a particular craft challenge that I don’t think gets talked about enough, and it’s this: writing pain that the reader feels completely but the character never shows.
I want to be precise about what I mean, because there is a version of this that is simply withholding — the author knows something the reader doesn’t, and the tension comes from that gap. That’s a legitimate technique and it has its place. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is something harder and, when it works, something far more devastating. The character is not hiding their pain from the reader. The character is hiding their pain from everyone, including themselves, and the author’s job is to write that hiding so completely and so honestly that the reader feels every single thing the character is refusing to feel.
The pain isn’t invisible. That’s the thing. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way someone doesn’t answer a question directly. It’s in what they reach for when a room gets too quiet. It’s in the joke they make at exactly the wrong moment, the one that lands a little too sharp, the one that makes the person across from them go still for just a second before they decide to let it go. It’s in the way they stand near a door. It’s in what they don’t say when someone who loves them leaves a silence open long enough for honesty to step into.
The reader sees all of it. That’s the whole point. The reader is supposed to see all of it and feel the weight of it pressing against all that careful containment, and understand — maybe before the character does — exactly what is being held back and exactly what it is costing.
Deacon Worth does not talk about his head injury the way someone who has made peace with it would talk about it. He talks about it the way someone who has built a very convincing replica of peace and placed it where the real thing used to be. The reader knows the difference. Deke, for a long time, does not let himself know the difference, and that gap — between what the reader can see and what the character will admit — is where the pain lives.
Kon carries two years of almost, two years of waiting, two years of hope that kept getting pulled out from under him, and he carries it so quietly that the people around him might not notice. The reader notices. The reader is supposed to notice. I put it in the silences and the careful word choices and the things he watches when he thinks no one is watching him, and I trust the reader to feel the weight of it even when Kon himself would rather they didn’t.
That is the craft of it, as far as I understand it. You have to know the pain completely — its shape, its history, its specific texture for this specific person — and then you have to render it entirely in shadow. Not absence. Shadow. The outline of something rather than the thing itself, drawn precisely enough that what it outlines is unmistakable.
When a reader tells me a scene broke them and they can’t quite explain why, when they say they felt something they couldn’t name — that is usually this. That is the invisible pain doing its work. Not invisible because it isn’t there. Invisible because the character needs it to be, and the author loved them enough to honour that need while making sure the reader could see through it anyway.
It’s a strange kind of betrayal, in the best possible sense. You protect the character’s secret and you give it away at the same time.
That tension, held carefully, is one of the most powerful things fiction can do.
