Author: Bella Bruce

Bella Bruce writes emotional hockey romance filled with found family, hard-won love, chaotic locker rooms, and the kind of people who leave the hallway light on for you. Creator of the Premier Hockey League universe.

The Arena as Sacred Space: Grounding Your Hockey Romance in Sensory Detail

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

I have never walked into an NHL arena and felt the cold hit me before I expected it.

I have never smelled the particular combination of ice and popcorn and whatever industrial cleaning product they use on the concourse floors that apparently every hockey arena in North America shares as a kind of olfactory signature. I have never felt the vibration of twenty thousand people reacting to the same thing at the same moment move through the soles of my feet and up into my chest. I live in rural Tasmania. The nearest NHL game is approximately as far away as it is possible to get while remaining on the same planet.

And yet.

I have written arena scenes that readers who attend games regularly have told me felt true. Not approximately true. Not close enough. True. The cold that gets into your bones in a way that outdoor cold somehow doesn’t. The sound of skate blades on ice during warmup — that particular crisp, clean bite — carrying all the way to the upper bowl. The way the light sits differently over the ice than anywhere else in the building, bright and almost clinical, making everything on its surface hyper-visible while the stands exist in comparative shadow.

I know these things because I have done the work. And I want to talk about what that work looks like, and why it is some of the most important work you will do in building a hockey romance universe.

The Arena Is Where Your Story Lives

Every genre has its sacred spaces — the places where the emotional and thematic weight of the story concentrates, where characters become most fully themselves, where the reader understands most clearly what everything is for. In legal thrillers it’s the courtroom. In medical dramas it’s the operating theatre. In hockey romance, it is the arena, and everything that happens within its particular geography.

This matters because your readers come to your books already carrying a relationship with this space. Some of them have been going to games since childhood, dragged along by a parent and discovering to their surprise that they loved it. Some of them found hockey as adults and came to the arena as converts — the particular passionate devotion of someone who chose the sport rather than inherited it. Some of them have never been to a live game but have watched hundreds on television and have built a vivid sensory imagination of what the real experience would be like.

All of them will know, on some level, whether you know what you’re talking about.

The arena is not a setting you can approximate and hope nobody notices. It is the sacred space of your genre, and it asks to be treated with the specificity and reverence it deserves.

Cold Is Not Just Cold

Let’s start with the most fundamental sensory fact of any hockey arena: the cold.

But here’s what most people who haven’t thought carefully about it miss — the cold of an ice arena is not like the cold of a winter day outside. Outdoor cold moves. It has wind and variation and your body can negotiate with it, can find a patch of sunlight or a sheltered corner and feel temporary relief. The cold of an arena is static and total. It comes up from the ice and spreads through the building and it doesn’t negotiate. You cannot warm up by standing in a different spot. It just is, a constant low-level presence that settles into the joints after twenty minutes and becomes simply the condition of being there.

This has texture as a writing tool. Your characters feel it differently depending on who they are and what they’re doing. The player who has been on the ice for a shift comes to the bench overheated and the cold is relief, almost sensual in its contrast to the effort of the previous two minutes. The journalist in the press box two hours into a game is wearing every layer they brought and still feels it in their fingers when they type. The partner in the stands who came dressed for a night out and not for a refrigerated building discovers an entirely involuntary vulnerability — the body has no performance mode for being cold, and there is something unexpectedly intimate about watching someone who is a little too cold, who has tucked themselves down into their jacket collar and is sitting with their arms wrapped around themselves.

Cold is not just cold. It is character revelation and emotional texture and the physical reality that your arena imposes on everyone inside it equally, without reference to their status or their intention.

Use it.

The Sound Architecture of an Arena

An arena has a sound architecture that changes depending on where you are within it and what is happening on the ice, and understanding that architecture will make your scenes feel inhabited rather than described.

At ice level, everything is immediate and percussive. The sound of a body hitting the boards at full speed is not the distant thud it appears to be from the stands — it reverberates. You feel it as much as hear it. Skate blades make different sounds depending on what they’re doing: the long clean stride of a player building speed is different from the sharp stop spray, different again from the quick edge work of someone protecting the puck in the corner. These sounds exist in real arenas and readers who know hockey will recognise them immediately when you name them. Readers who don’t know hockey will believe you because the specificity of observed detail carries its own authority.

From the stands, the sound becomes collective. The crowd has its own rhythms — the held breath before a shot, the collective exhale when it goes wide, the roar that happens before you’ve consciously registered that a goal has been scored because the body responds faster than the mind. There is a particular sound that arenas make when something is about to happen, a kind of gathered intensity in the crowd noise, that experienced fans learn to read almost like a sixth sense. Your characters who have been coming to games for years carry this knowledge in their bodies. Your characters attending for the first time are buffeted by sound events they don’t yet know how to interpret.

The commentary booth, the penalty box, the tunnel between the dressing room and the ice — each location in your arena has a distinct sound environment. Know where your scene is happening and write the sound that belongs to that specific location.

The Ice Itself

The ice deserves its own attention because it is extraordinary and most people have never really looked at it.

Fresh ice, resurfaced at the start of a game or between periods, is almost impossibly perfect — a surface so smooth it seems to have a slight sheen, the lines painted beneath it hyper-saturated in a way that makes the whole thing look almost artificial, like something rendered rather than real. As the game progresses, the ice deteriorates. By the end of a period it is carved and scuffed and the corners are a mess of snow and the face-off dots are obscured and the whole surface tells the story of the previous twenty minutes in its damage.

This progression — from perfect to marked — is a metaphor your genre hands you for free. The pristine ice at the start of a game and what it looks like when the buzzer goes is a physical representation of everything the period cost, everything that happened, every decision and collision and moment of beauty and ugliness that the players brought to it.

Your arena has boards and glass and penalty boxes and player benches and a scoreboard that the entire building watches at critical moments. It has the logos at centre ice and the faceoff circles and the crease in front of each goal where the rules change and the most contested real estate on the surface exists. These physical features of the ice are not decorative details. They are the geography of your characters’ professional world, as familiar to your players as the layout of a long-occupied house.

Write the ice like someone who has looked at it carefully enough to have feelings about it.

Sensory Detail as Emotional Access

Here is the deeper reason why sensory specificity in arena scenes matters beyond mere authenticity: it is the fastest and most reliable route into your reader’s emotional experience of the scene.

Abstract emotion — telling the reader that a character is nervous, excited, in love, afraid — lands on the surface of the reading experience. Sensory detail lands inside it. When your heroine is in the stands watching someone she is slowly and helplessly falling in love with step onto the ice, the emotional content of that moment is carried by what she notices. The way the cold she’s been ignoring for an hour suddenly feels different when she sees him. The way the particular sound of his skates registers distinctly from the general noise of warmup, though she couldn’t explain how she knows which sounds are his. The way the light over the ice makes everything on its surface look more real than the rest of the world rather than less.

She isn’t telling us she’s in love. The ice is telling us. The cold is telling us. The specific quality of her attention, rendered through what her senses are reporting, is doing the work that pages of internal monologue cannot do as elegantly.

Sensory detail is emotional access. The arena, with its extraordinary richness of physical experience, gives you more access points than almost any other setting in the genre.

The Arena After Hours

There is one more location within your arena that deserves attention, and it is the one that appears least in the literature despite being rich with possibility: the arena when it’s empty.

An empty hockey arena is a genuinely strange and affecting space. The ice is there, perfect and indifferent, with no performance to justify it. The stands that held thousands of people a few hours ago are silent in a way that seems to carry the echo of the crowd rather than simply its absence. The lights may be reduced to working levels rather than game brightness, and in that dimmer light the space feels both larger and more intimate simultaneously.

Characters who find themselves in an empty arena — a player alone on the ice at midnight working through something he can’t resolve in words, two people having a conversation in the stands that they couldn’t have anywhere else because the space demands a certain honesty — are in a location that your reader will feel immediately even if they’ve never experienced it themselves. The arena stripped of its crowd and its purpose is the arena showing its bones, and there is something sacred about that too.

I write hockey arenas from Tasmania, from memory and research and the generosity of people who have been willing to describe their experience in the kind of specific, granular detail that most people don’t think to record because it seems too ordinary to be worth noting. I follow the Washington Capitals with the devotion of someone who has chosen this sport from the far side of the world and refuses to love it at a distance. I go a little nocturnal during the playoffs. I know what it costs to care about something you can’t easily reach.

That distance has taught me something I might not have learned otherwise: nothing about a hockey arena is ordinary. The people who attend games regularly have simply had the extraordinary become familiar. Your job as a writer is to restore the strangeness — to write the cold and the sound and the ice and the light as if you are encountering them for the first time and finding them almost unbearably vivid.

Make your reader feel the cold.

Make them hear the ice.

Make them understand, on a sensory level, why this space is sacred — why the people who belong to it will sacrifice almost anything to stay inside it.

The rest of the story will take care of itself.

Building Rivalries: How Opposing Teams Can Fuel Conflict Across an Entire Series

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

Some rivalries are born on the ice.

Others are born in a parking lot outside an arena at eleven o’clock at night when a Portland Pioneer looks up and realises the man walking towards him is wearing a Thunder Bay Storm jacket and everything that has been simmering for three seasons is about to come to a very ugly head.

And some rivalries — the best ones, the ones that outlast careers and follow franchises across an entire continent and end up generating fifteen books in a fictional hockey universe — are born from something so personal, so raw, and so fundamentally human that the sport almost becomes incidental. The games between Portland and Thunder Bay were always gritty. Always nasty. Never ended without someone paying a physical price and everyone leaving with their tempers running a few degrees hotter than when they arrived. But what turned a fierce on-ice competition into something that went bone-deep for both franchises was the day the Thunder Bay captain went after the wife of one of the Pioneers forwards.

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment.

Because that — right there — is what a rivalry is actually made of.

Competition Alone Is Not a Rivalry

Here is a distinction that matters enormously and that sports romance sometimes glosses over: competition is not the same thing as rivalry. Two teams can compete fiercely, can push each other to their limits, can produce spectacular games full of physical intensity and genuine drama — and still not have a rivalry. Competition is structural. Rivalry is personal.

A rivalry requires history. It requires accumulated grievances and specific memories and the particular way that certain opponents seem to bring out something in your team that nobody else can access — something darker and more driven and occasionally something uglier than you want it to be. Rivalry requires that the outcome of the game feels like it means something beyond the standings, that losing to this particular team stings in a way that losing to anyone else simply doesn’t.

Portland and Thunder Bay had all of that before anyone’s wife went anywhere. The games between them were appointment television for fans of both franchises — physical, tactical, contested from the first puck drop to the final whistle, with a penalty count that made the officials look exhausted by the second period. There was genuine respect underneath the hostility, which is almost always the engine of the best rivalries. You don’t hate a team you don’t fear. You don’t play that hard against someone you don’t think can beat you.

But then the personal arrived and blew the structural to pieces. And now it isn’t just a rivalry. It’s a wound.

The Personal Is What Makes It Narrative Gold

Let’s talk about what the stolen wife actually does to the story architecture of an entire series, because it does an astonishing amount of work for a single plot event.

First, it personalises the rivalry in a way that pure on-ice competition cannot. Every time Portland plays Thunder Bay — or, later, the Honolulu Trade Winds — there is a specific human being on that bench whose presence means something to specific people in the Portland dressing room. The history between these teams isn’t abstract. It has a face and a name and a betrayal attached to it, and that betrayal colours every interaction between the franchises for years after the fact.

Second, it creates differentiated experiences within your ensemble cast. Not every Pioneer feels the same way about this. Some of them were close to the forward whose marriage ended and carry a fierce protective anger on his behalf. Some of them are more complicated — maybe they saw the cracks in that marriage and have quietly conflicted feelings they would never voice in the locker room. Some of the younger players came up after it happened and know it only as history, as legend, as something that explains the look on their veteran teammates’ faces when Thunder Bay is on the schedule. That variation in how your characters relate to the shared history is enormously useful for creating distinct voices and perspectives across multiple books.

Third — and this is the one I find most interesting — it gives your rival franchise moral texture. The Thunder Bay captain who did this is not a cartoon villain. He is someone who wanted something and took it in a way that caused real harm, and who has presumably had to live with the fallout of that choice just as the Pioneer forward has. That complexity is what makes the Honolulu Trade Winds fifteen books of story rather than fifteen books of obstacle. The rival franchise needs to be as fully human as the home team, and nothing humanises people faster than giving them something they did wrong that they can’t undo.

When the Rival Franchise Moves

The relocation of the Thunder Bay Storm to become the Honolulu Trade Winds is a gift to your narrative that keeps giving across multiple storylines, and I want to explain exactly why.

A franchise relocation carries its own emotional freight independent of anything else happening in the story. For Thunder Bay fans — and there would be Thunder Bay fans, people who grew up with that team as part of the texture of their city — the move is a loss, a small civic grief that tends to generate the kind of resentment that attaches itself to whoever they blame for the decision. For the players who move with the franchise, there is the strange experience of being the same team in a completely different world. For the players who don’t make the move — who are traded or released in the restructuring that typically accompanies relocation — there is the particular disorientation of a team identity suddenly having no geography to anchor it.

And for Portland and their fans, the relocation of their oldest rival doesn’t end the rivalry. It transforms it. Because now when these teams meet, the stakes include everything they always included plus the weight of everything Portland remembers about Thunder Bay that Honolulu hasn’t earned and doesn’t know. Portland plays the Trade Winds and sees the Storm. That layer of memory and loss and complicated feeling — for players old enough to have been there, and for the institutional memory carried by coaches and front office staff and the franchise itself — gives the rivalry a depth that newly minted competitions simply cannot have.

The man who built the Trade Winds in Hawaii — who took his love of hockey and his broken playing career and his considerable fortune and planted an ice rink in the Pacific — didn’t just move a team. He moved a history. Whether he fully understood what he was carrying with him is a question worth exploring across those fifteen books.

How to Build a Rival Franchise That Deserves Its Own Series

The Honolulu Trade Winds get fifteen books. That means they cannot function as pure antagonists to the Portland Pioneers’ protagonists. They have to be a fully realised world — with their own internal culture, their own character arcs, their own love stories and conflicts and moments of grace.

This is the challenge and the opportunity of building a rival franchise that you intend to take seriously as a narrative subject rather than just a source of opposition.

The key is to ensure that your rival team is coherent on its own terms, not just in contrast to your home team. The Trade Winds aren’t defined by not being the Pioneers. They have their own identity — shaped by the strange and deliberate act of their creation, by the Hawaiian context that surrounds them, by the particular kind of player who ends up in Honolulu and what that says about where they are in their career or their life. Some of those players chose Honolulu because they wanted something different. Some of them ended up there because they ran out of other options. Some of them are there because they believe in what the founder was trying to build. Those different relationships to the franchise create your cast of fifteen heroes.

The history between the franchises means that crossover is inevitable and structurally rich. What happens when a Pioneer is traded to Honolulu? What happens when a Trade Wind falls for someone in Portland’s orbit? What happens when the captain who caused all that damage years ago has to reckon with the consequences of it not just in someone else’s life but in his own? These are the questions that a well-built rivalry makes available to you — questions that are only possible because you took the time to make both sides of the conflict fully real.

Sustaining Rivalry Across Multiple Books Without Repetition

A series-spanning rivalry has one significant structural challenge: you have to keep it alive across multiple books without letting it become a monotonous drumbeat of the same conflict dressed in different clothes. The rivalry needs to evolve. It needs to change as the people within it change, as careers progress and circumstances shift and the original wound either scabs over or gets reopened in new ways.

The most effective technique is to ensure that each book in your series advances the rivalry in some small way, even when that book isn’t primarily about the rivalry itself. A reference to an upcoming game against Honolulu that carries a different emotional weight for this particular hero than it did for the last one. A Trade Winds player glimpsed in a way that plants a seed for a later story. A piece of the original Thunder Bay history that resurfaces and lands differently now that the people involved have changed.

The rivalry is a river running through your universe. It doesn’t appear on every page, but it never stops flowing.

Portland and Thunder Bay should never have been able to coexist in the same league without generating exactly the kind of history they generated. Sometimes two franchises, like two people, have a chemistry that makes everything more intense — the competition, the respect, the animosity, the moments of begrudging admiration that neither side would ever admit to out loud.

The captain who went after the Pioneer’s wife didn’t just blow up a marriage. He lit a fuse that is still burning fifteen books later in a city built on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

That is what a good rivalry does.

It outlasts everything that created it and keeps finding new ways to matter.

The Front Office and Coaching Staff: Why Your Non-Player Characters Matter More Than You Think

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

Let me tell you something that took me longer to articulate than it should have.

I have 32 fully named men’s league teams in my fictional hockey universe. Thirty-two. Every one of them has a complete front office, a full coaching staff, and a team support structure that exists whether or not those people ever appear on the page. I have 16 women’s league teams built to the same standard. That’s 48 organisations, each with their own internal hierarchy and culture and the particular human ecosystem that forms when ambitious, passionate people spend their professional lives in proximity to a sport they love.

And here’s the thing I learned somewhere around the third team: the people in the front office are not supporting characters. They are not set dressing. They are not a mechanism for delivering plot information to the players who are the “real” characters. They are full human beings with their own desires and wounds and storylines — and in my Portland universe, several of them are the women who will eventually become the partners of my players. They just don’t know that yet.

That detail — the women already inside the organisation, already doing their jobs brilliantly, already part of the world before any romantic storyline begins — is one of the things I’m proudest of in how I’ve built this universe. It happened because I treated the front office as real. And I want to talk about why you should too.

The Front Office Is Where the Power Actually Lives

There’s a tendency in sports romance to treat the hockey organisation as essentially equivalent to the team itself — the players, the ice, the games. The front office exists in the background, occasionally producing a gruff general manager who creates a trade conflict or a slick owner who causes problems. They’re plot devices. They’re obstacles. They appear when the story needs them and recede when it doesn’t.

This is a missed opportunity of staggering proportions.

The front office is where the actual decisions get made. It’s where contracts are negotiated and careers are shaped and the culture of a franchise is either protected or slowly eroded. It’s where someone is working at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night because the salary cap situation has become genuinely alarming, and where someone else is fielding a call from a sponsor who saw something they didn’t like in a post-game interview. The front office carries the organisation in ways that are invisible on game night and absolutely essential every other hour of the year.

When you make those people real — when you give them expertise and ambition and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about something you can never fully control — your fictional franchise starts to feel like an actual institution rather than a backdrop for romance. Readers feel that difference even when they can’t articulate it.

The Coach Is Not Just a Plot Device

In my Portland universe, the head coach is the father of four of the players on the roster. He and his wife are also part owners of the franchise. Their origin story — how they built this life, what it cost, what it gave them — is the book that sits between my first series and the band series, the gravitational centre of the entire universe.

I’m telling you this because it illustrates something I think is fundamental: the coach shapes the culture of your team more than any player, any general manager, or any owner who stays at arm’s length from daily operations. The coach is the person your players spend the most time with, whose approval means the most, whose disappointment lands the heaviest. They set the standard for what is tolerated and what isn’t, what gets talked about openly and what stays buried, whether the locker room is a place of genuine safety or a place where certain truths are never allowed to surface.

A coach who is also a father — who has watched his own children grow up inside this world, who carries both professional obligation and fierce parental love into every decision he makes — is a character of extraordinary complexity. His authority comes pre-loaded with history. His relationships with his players are never purely professional because the ones who are his children carry everything they’ve ever been to each other onto the ice. And the ones who aren’t his children are navigating what it means to be seen by a man who is both their boss and someone else’s father, someone who knows what it looks like when a young man is struggling before the young man himself has found the words.

Give your coach a life before the story starts. Give them a reason for being in this particular building with these particular people. The coaching staff who surround them — the assistants, the goalie coach, the development coaches — all carry their own histories and loyalties and the particular competitive hunger of people who love the game but whose path to it ran through the bench rather than the ice. They are rich territory. Use them.

The Women Already in the Building

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it’s one of the most important structural decisions I made in building my universe, even though I didn’t fully recognise it as a decision at the time.

My front office contains the owner’s daughter. A massage therapist. A member of the legal team. The marketing director. These women are professionals. They are good at their jobs. They have careers and ambitions and a place in this organisation that has nothing to do with the players they will eventually fall in love with. They belong to this world on their own terms.

The women don’t know they’re going to be WAGs yet. Neither do the men. They’re just people who work in the same building, or orbit the same professional world, and whose lives have not yet intersected in the way they’re going to.

I love this so much because it reflects how relationships actually form in professional environments. Not through meet-cutes engineered by fate, but through proximity and time and the slow accumulation of small moments — the conversation in the corridor after a difficult game, the late night in the office when everyone else has gone home, the moment when professional respect tips quietly into something that makes the room feel different. The romantic tension in these stories is earned because these characters already have a reason to know each other before the love story begins.

The owner’s daughter occupying a professional role in the franchise her family owns is a story engine all by herself. The power dynamics she has to navigate — being taken seriously in her own right versus being seen as inherited authority, loving the organisation her parents built while needing to make her own mark on it — are endlessly generative. The fact that she will also, eventually, have a love story that runs through the same corridors she’s always walked in a professional capacity makes that love story richer, not more complicated.

The massage therapist has access to athletes in their most physically vulnerable state — exhausted, in pain, trusting her with the body that is also their instrument. The intimacy of that professional relationship, conducted with scrupulous ethics and genuine care, creates a very specific kind of tension when feelings begin to develop that neither person was expecting. The legal team member brings an entirely different set of values and skills into the building — the careful thinking, the attention to risk, the protective instinct. The marketing director sees the public face of the franchise and the private reality behind it every single day, and she knows the gap between those two things better than almost anyone.

These are not women waiting to become WAGs. They are women who exist, fully formed, in a world that will eventually deliver them a love story. The love story is what happens to them. Not who they are.

Building Organisations You’ll Never Fully Show

Here is the part of this that might sound like madness but I promise has a purpose: all 32 of my men’s league teams and all 16 of my women’s league teams are fully built. Named rosters, front offices, support staff — the whole architecture.

Most of those people will never appear on the page in any significant way. Some of them will never appear at all. So why build them?

Because the teams your heroes play against need to feel like they come from somewhere. When your Portland players face a rival franchise, that rival has its own culture, its own internal tensions, its own way of doing things — and if you know what that is, even if you never write it explicitly, it comes through in how you write the game, the press conferences, the way your hero reads the opposition. The iceberg principle applies to organisations just as much as it applies to individual characters. What’s visible is only possible because of what’s invisible beneath it.

And honestly? Some of those 48 organisations will eventually demand their own stories. The women’s league teams share that same standard of construction because those players deserve a world built with the same care and attention as the men’s teams. Their front offices have their own politics and their own people and their own complicated relationships between professional authority and personal history. Treating the women’s league as fully real, not as a satellite universe orbiting the men’s teams, was a decision I made deliberately and one I’d make again without hesitation.

Your front office is the skeleton of your franchise. Your coaching staff is its nervous system. The players are the face everyone sees, the story everyone follows — but they are only able to be who they are because of the structure that exists around them, behind them, and long before they arrived.

Build that structure. Name those people. Give them reasons for being there. Let the women in your front office be professionals first and love interests second. Let your coach have a history that makes his authority mean something.

Your readers will feel the difference, even if they never quite know why the world you’ve built feels so extraordinarily, stubbornly real.

It’s because you treated everyone in the building like they matter.

Because they do.

Creating a Home City: Using Setting as a Character in Your Hockey Universe

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a city I love that I have never been able to call home.

Portland, Oregon sits in that particular corner of my heart reserved for things that are yours in every way that matters and yet somehow just out of reach. I found it through a person — someone I love still, someone I will always love — and what we had was real and true and not quite possible to build into a life. The world we were navigating didn’t have the architecture for us. Same-sex marriage wasn’t yet a legal reality, and the immigration policies of both our countries had no interest in making exceptions for two women who had found something rare and were trying to hold onto it across an ocean. We loved each other. We still do. It just couldn’t be what we both wanted it to be.

So I did what writers do with the things they can’t keep. I made it into a world.

Portland became the home of my hockey universe for reasons that are practical and personal in equal measure. I have someone there I trust completely, someone who has been my eyes and ears and orientation on the ground for years — a person who will answer a text at an inconvenient hour to confirm whether a particular neighbourhood smells like coffee and rain or whether I’ve romanticised that detail from a visit I made years ago. The city just felt right in the way that only the truest creative decisions feel right — not chosen so much as recognised.

But here’s what I’ve learned from building an entire fictional NHL franchise in a city I love from a distance: setting is not backdrop. Setting is character. And if you treat it that way from the very beginning, it will do an enormous amount of your narrative work for you.

Your City Has a Personality, and You Need to Know It

The first question to ask yourself when choosing a home city for your hockey universe is not logistical. It’s not about whether the city could realistically support an NHL franchise or whether the climate makes sense for ice sports. Those things matter, but they’re secondary to a more fundamental question: what kind of city is this, and how does that shape the people who live there?

Every city has a personality. Not a stereotype — a genuine, textured set of values and rhythms and contradictions that residents recognise immediately and outsiders sense within hours of arriving. Portland’s personality is specific and deeply useful for fiction. It’s a city that takes its coffee seriously and its politics loudly, that has fierce civic pride alongside genuine social consciousness, that sits in landscape so dramatically beautiful it makes people feel things they weren’t prepared to feel. It’s a city that attracts people who chose it deliberately — not people who ended up there by default, but people who arrived with intention and stayed because it matched something in them.

That personality shapes my characters before I write a single word of their stories. A player who comes to Portland from a corporate, high-pressure hockey market and discovers he actually likes the farmers market and the independent bookshops and the weird little neighbourhood bar where the bartender knows his order by week three — that’s a character arc the city is generating for me, without me having to manufacture it artificially. The setting is doing the work.

Know your city’s personality. Not the travel brochure version. The real version, with its complications and contradictions and the things the locals find quietly embarrassing about the tourists. That’s the version that will make your world feel inhabited.

Specificity Is Everything

Here is the single most important craft principle when it comes to writing place: vague setting feels like no setting at all.

Readers can tell the difference between a city that has been researched and a city that has been gestured at. They can tell when an author has walked those streets — or found someone who has — versus when the setting is a named location with generic urban furniture arranged inside it. A coffee shop in a city you know is a specific place with a particular kind of chair and a view of a particular intersection and a barista who has an opinion about the neighbourhood’s changing character. A coffee shop in a city you don’t know is just a coffee shop.

This is where having someone on the ground is invaluable, and I don’t say that lightly. My Portland person has saved me from countless details I would have gotten wrong — not dramatically wrong, just slightly off in the way that readers who know the city would feel as a faint wrongness, a sense that something doesn’t quite sit right. The angle of the light in a particular season. Whether a character would realistically take that route between those two neighbourhoods. What the stadium district feels like on a game night when the streets are full and the air has that electric quality of collective anticipation.

If you’re writing a city you don’t know personally, find your person. Find someone who lives there and loves it and is willing to be your consultant. Writers’ communities are generous in this way — someone almost always knows someone. That relationship will improve your writing in ways that no amount of Google Street View research can fully replicate, because what you need isn’t images. It’s the felt sense of a place.

Let the City Create Conflict

Setting isn’t just atmosphere. In a well-built fictional world, the city actively generates conflict for your characters — and not just the obvious logistical conflict of traffic and weather and the difficulty of finding parking near the arena.

Portland’s geography, for instance, gives me conflict I didn’t have to invent. The city is divided by the Willamette River into east and west, and those two sides carry distinct personalities and different costs of living. A veteran player who can afford the established west side neighbourhoods exists in a different Portland than the rookie on an entry-level contract scrambling to find something decent in a rapidly gentrifying east side neighbourhood. Their city is the same city but it isn’t, and that difference in experience creates immediate character texture and potential for connection across difference.

The weather is conflict. Portland’s famous grey, wet winters are not just atmospheric backdrop — they’re an active presence that shapes how people move through the city, how they feel in their bodies, how they relate to seasons and light and the particular joy of a rare clear day in February when the mountain appears on the horizon like a gift nobody ordered. A character who grew up in a sun-saturated climate and arrives in Portland for their first November is having an experience that tells you something about their adaptability and their relationship with discomfort.

Ask yourself: what does my city do to people who aren’t expecting it? What does it do to people who chose it? How does it reward loyalty and resist certain kinds of ambition? The answers are your conflict.

The Arena as the City’s Heart

In a hockey romance universe, the arena occupies a special place in your city’s geography. It’s not just a venue — it’s the place where your city’s collective emotional life gets expressed in its most concentrated form. On game nights, the arena is where the city becomes briefly unified, where strangers share a language and a purpose and the particular intimacy of wanting the same thing at the same time.

Think carefully about where your arena sits in the urban landscape. Is it downtown, embedded in the heartbeat of the city, surrounded by bars and restaurants that live and die on game nights? Is it on the edge of the city, requiring a deliberate journey that becomes part of the ritual? What does the neighbourhood around it look like, and what does the contrast between that neighbourhood on a game night versus a Tuesday morning in February tell your reader about the role hockey plays in your fictional community?

The arena and the city should feel inseparable. The arena is where your team lives. The city is what your team represents. When your players skate out for a home game, they’re carrying something of the place on their shoulders — the pride, the expectation, the history. That weight is only meaningful if you’ve made the city real enough to generate it.

Your City Will Tell You Things You Didn’t Know You Needed

This is the part I didn’t expect when I started building Portland as the home of my universe, the part that still surprises me even now with 58 books mapped out and a series bible that has taken on a life of its own.

The city tells you things.

When you know a place well enough — when you’ve loved it long enough, researched it deeply enough, talked to the right people about the right corners of it — it starts to generate story without you asking. A neighbourhood you chose for purely practical plot reasons turns out to have a history that becomes thematically perfect. A weather pattern you included for atmosphere becomes a metaphor you didn’t plan. A geographical feature that just seemed like good description ends up being exactly the right place for a scene you didn’t know you needed.

I think this happens because real places have an integrity that invented places have to work harder to achieve. When you’re drawing on something true, that truth has roots — and those roots go deeper than you can consciously map. Portland’s particular combination of natural beauty and urban grit and fierce independent spirit has shaped my characters in ways I’m still discovering, three series deep into a universe that started with a love story I couldn’t keep.

I couldn’t build a life there. But I could build a world.

And it turns out that worlds, unlike lives, have no immigration restrictions. Mine is open to everyone.

Your home city is not the place where your story happens. It’s the reason your story happens the way it does, with these particular people, in this specific emotional register. Choose it with your whole heart. Research it until it feels like memory. Love it like it’s yours.

Because the best fictional cities always are.

Starting with the Team: How to Build a Roster That Drives Multiple Books

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

I live in rural Tasmania. In Australia. Where it is currently summer and the nearest ice rink is a very long drive away. And yet somehow, I have spent the last several years building a fictional NHL franchise — complete with AHL and ECHL affiliates, a cheer squad, a rival team transplanted to Honolulu, a women’s league, a band, a television production company, and a cast of characters so large they now occupy 385 pages of series bible.

Fifty-eight books. That’s where this universe currently sits. Fifty-eight.

I tell you this not to brag — well, maybe a little — but because I want you to understand that what started as one hockey romance series has grown into something I genuinely did not plan and could not have predicted. And the reason it was able to grow like that, the reason those threads kept revealing themselves and asking to be followed, is because of what I did right at the very beginning. I built the roster first.

If you’ve ever fallen down the rabbit hole of a hockey romance series — and if you’re here, I’m guessing you have — you’ll know that specific feeling of finishing one book and immediately wanting to know whose story is coming next. You’ve spotted them in the background. You’ve caught a line of dialogue that made you sit up straighter. You’ve watched a character do something small and telling and thought oh, you have a whole book inside you, don’t you?

That’s not an accident. That’s an author who built their roster on purpose.

Creating a fictional hockey team that can sustain multiple books is one of the most satisfying and most underestimated parts of writing a hockey romance universe. Get it right and you have a living, breathing world that readers will return to again and again. Get it wrong and you end up frantically inventing new characters out of thin air every time you need a hero, with no connective tissue holding anything together.

So let’s talk about how to do it well.

Start With More Players Than You’ll Ever Need

Here’s the first and most important thing: build a bigger roster than you think you’ll use. A real NHL team carries around 23 players on their active roster, plus a minor league affiliate full of hopefuls and call-ups. You don’t need to develop all of them. You don’t even need to name all of them. But you need to know they exist, because that depth is what makes your team feel real rather than like a convenient vehicle for romance plots.

I know this because I accidentally proved it. When I started building my Portland franchise, I named not just the NHL roster but the entire AHL affiliate and the ECHL affiliate beneath that. At the time I thought I was being obsessive. What I was actually doing was creating a pipeline — a world of players at different stages of their careers, with different levels of certainty about their futures, and entirely different emotional landscapes to explore. Some of my richest story potential lives in those affiliate rosters. The guy grinding away in the ECHL trying to crack the big league carries a very different energy to the established NHL star, and both of them deserve a love story.

Give yourself permission to populate your world generously at the start, even if most of those names are just names for now. Some of them will surprise you. You’ll write a throwaway line about a guy who snores on the team bus and suddenly you’ll know exactly who he is and why he’s lonely and what kind of person would crack his heart open. That’s the magic of a fully realised roster — it creates its own stories without you forcing anything.

Think in Positions, Personalities, and Contrasts

One of the best ways to approach your initial character building is to think about the natural contrasts that hockey positions create. You’ve got your forwards who score the glory goals and eat up public attention. You’ve got your defensemen who do the unglamorous protective work and rarely get the credit. You’ve got your goalies, who are famously, delightfully unhinged, existing in their own psychological universe at the other end of the ice. And you’ve got your enforcers and grinders — the guys who bring the physical sacrifice, whose relationship with their own bodies is often complicated and rich with story potential.

These aren’t just tactical distinctions. They’re personality frameworks. The flashy sniper who can’t stop seeking the spotlight. The shutdown defenseman who has spent his entire career protecting other people and has no idea how to let anyone protect him. The goalie who has developed elaborate superstitions to manage the crushing psychological pressure of being the last line of defence. These archetypes are familiar enough to feel grounded and distinct enough to give each hero their own flavour.

You want contrast working for you throughout your roster — not just in terms of position, but in terms of personality, background, age, and where each character sits in their career arc. Mix your veterans with your rookies. Mix your confident public personas with your private introverts. Mix the guy who grew up wealthy in a major hockey market with the kid who played on an outdoor rink in a small town because that was all his family could afford.

In my own universe I went even further with contrast by building a rival franchise in Honolulu — which is about as far from Portland’s grey skies and rain-soaked streets as you can get while staying in the same league. The contrast between those two cities does atmospheric work for me across fifteen books before I’ve written a single word of rivalry. Contrast is doing the heavy lifting before your characters even open their mouths.

Know Your Captain

Every team has a captain, and in a hockey romance universe, your captain matters enormously. They set the tone for what your team values. They’re the character other players measure themselves against, or push back against, or desperately want approval from. They shape the culture of your locker room, which in turn shapes the world your heroes inhabit.

Your captain doesn’t have to be your first hero or even a hero at all — sometimes the most interesting captains are supporting characters who show up across multiple books, consistent and grounding, a fixed point in a shifting world. But you need to know who they are and what they stand for before you write anything else, because that knowledge will inform every scene set in the team environment.

Ask yourself: is your captain old school or progressive? Do they lead by example or by force of personality? Are they beloved or complicated? Do they know what’s happening in their locker room, or are they deliberately not looking? The answers ripple outward through your entire universe. In my Portland franchise, the culture of the team flows directly from the founding vision of the coach and his wife — who are also part owners — and that means the values embedded at the very top of the organisation shape everything below it. Your captain is the on-ice expression of those values. Choose them carefully.

Plant Future Heroes in Current Stories

This is the craft element that separates a good hockey romance series from a great one, and it’s simpler than it sounds. When you’re writing your first book, you should already know — at least in broad strokes — whose stories are coming next. Not necessarily the full plot, but enough to seed that character into your current narrative with intention.

Give your future hero a moment. One scene where they say something that sticks. A gesture that reveals character. A reaction that hints at a wound the current story doesn’t have time to explore. You’re not writing their book yet — you’re making a promise to your reader that there’s more here than they’re currently seeing. Readers are remarkably good at picking up on this. They will notice the guy standing slightly apart from the group. They will clock the joke that lands a little too sharp to be entirely a joke. They will remember.

I discovered this accidentally when I was building my universe and realised I’d already seeded characters from the cheer squad and the band into the team’s world without consciously planning to. They were just there, orbiting the roster, because that’s what real people do — they exist in community with each other. When the time came to give those characters their own books, the groundwork was already laid. The readers who’d been there from the beginning would know these people. That’s an extraordinary gift to give your readership.

Don’t Forget the World Around the Roster

Here is something I learned the slightly hard way: a hockey team doesn’t exist in isolation. The cheer squad are there at every home game. The front office shapes every decision. The coaching staff carry their own complicated histories and loyalties. The partners and families of your players have entire interior lives that intersect with the team world in ways that create conflict and warmth and story.

In my universe, none of the women who will eventually become partners to these players know that’s their future yet. They’re just living their lives — working, creating, competing — and the team exists alongside them in the same city. That’s how real relationships form. Not through convenient plot mechanics but through proximity and time and the way certain worlds keep overlapping until two people can’t keep pretending they haven’t noticed each other.

Build the whole ecosystem, not just the roster. The roster is the heart. Everything else is the circulatory system that keeps it alive.

Keep a Series Bible and Protect It Fiercely

By the time you’re three books into a hockey romance series, you will have made a staggering number of small decisions about your team, your city, your arena, your front office, and your characters’ histories. The rookie year of a character mentioned in book one. The name of the team’s coach. The record-breaking season your captain had seven years ago. The bar where the team goes after home games.

None of these things feel important when you first write them. All of them become potential continuity disasters if you don’t track them.

My series bible is currently 385 pages long. I know that sounds extreme. It is extreme. It also means I can tell you the jersey number of every player on three league rosters, the names of every member of the cheer squad, and the exact configuration of relationships that will eventually connect my California characters to my Portland family. That document is the reason 58 books can share a universe without collapsing under the weight of their own continuity.

You don’t need 385 pages to start. You need a running document, updated as you write, that captures every decision you make about your world. Start it on day one. Future you will be deeply, profoundly grateful.

Let the Roster Evolve Naturally

Real hockey teams change. Players retire. Trades happen. Rookies arrive. Careers end earlier than anyone expected because the body has limits — and I have one character in my universe whose entire second act, including the franchise he eventually builds, exists because his body gave out before he was finished. The grief of that cut short career became the foundation of something extraordinary. That only works if you’re willing to let your fictional world move through time honestly.

Let your roster breathe. When a veteran character reaches the natural end of their playing days, let them retire — and then use that transition as story material, because the identity crisis of a professional athlete facing the end of their career is absolute gold for character-driven romance. When a trade serves the story, make the trade. When an exciting rookie arrives and shakes up the existing team dynamics, let that arrival land with real weight.

The team should feel like it’s moving through time alongside your readers, not sitting still waiting for each new hero’s story to begin.

Building a roster that drives multiple books is ultimately about one thing: treating your characters as people before they’re plot devices. Give them depth even when they’re in the background. Give them history even when the page doesn’t have room for it. Give them a world that feels like it exists whether or not you’re currently writing about them.

I built my Portland franchise from a tiny island in the Southern Ocean, following a sport I love despite never having easy access to it, because the world of hockey romance grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The roster I built became a universe I genuinely didn’t plan. And every single one of those 58 books exists because I took the time at the beginning to make the team real before I made the romance.

Do that, and your readers won’t just finish one book and move on. They’ll stay. They’ll wait. They’ll come back for every single story you’ve promised them — because you made them care about the whole team, not just the hero of the moment.

And honestly? That’s the dream.

Why Sports Romance Is Really About Belonging

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment
Because the jersey was never really about the game.

The Tribe We Choose

There is something almost primal about the way a person becomes a fan. It rarely starts with statistics or standings. It starts with a feeling — the first time you watched a game with your father and he leaned forward in his chair like the outcome physically mattered, or the afternoon you sat in a cold arena and heard ten thousand strangers exhale at exactly the same moment. You felt it too, that exhale. That’s when the team stopped being a team and became your team.

Sports fandom is, at its core, a story about belonging. We wear colours that aren’t ours. We say “we” when we mean “they.” We suffer through losing seasons and show up anyway, because showing up is what members of a tribe do. The team is a container for something that’s hard to name — community, continuity, identity, the comfort of having something outside yourself to believe in. Psychologists have studied this phenomenon for decades and keep arriving at the same conclusion: sports fans don’t just follow a team, they merge with it. Their self-esteem rises and falls with the scoreboard. Their sense of place in the world is shaped by whether the home side makes the playoffs.

When we understand fandom this way — not as a hobby but as a form of belonging — sports romance suddenly makes perfect sense. Because romance fiction has always been about belonging too. It has always been about the moment someone stops being alone in the most fundamental sense. Put those two things together and you have one of the most emotionally potent subgenres in fiction. You have a story where belonging happens twice: once to a team, and once to a person.

Why Readers Fall in Love With Fictional Teams

The fictional sports team is one of the great unsung achievements of romance world-building. Readers who have never watched a single game of ice hockey will devour an entire series set in a fictional NHL locker room. Readers who couldn’t tell you the difference between a power play and a penalty shot will stay up until two in the morning finishing a book about a struggling defenseman and the team physiotherapist who sees him clearly for the first time.

This happens because the author has done something very specific. They haven’t just invented players — they’ve invented a world with its own rituals, its own hierarchy, its own language, its own sense of who matters and what things mean. They’ve created a community complete enough that the reader can actually feel what it would be like to belong to it.

That is the quiet genius of sports romance at its best. The team functions as a secondary cast that never feels secondary. They are brothers and rivals and witnesses. They chirp the hero mercilessly and then show up silently when things fall apart. They have history with each other that pre-dates the story and will continue after it ends. When a reader falls in love with a fictional team — when they start mentally sorting which player is their favourite, when they feel genuine excitement about the next book because it features that character — something real has happened. They have extended their sense of belonging into a fictional world. And that is not a small thing. That is the whole point.

What the Locker Room Actually Is

The locker room, in sports romance, is almost never just a locker room. It is a liminal space — part sanctuary, part confessional, part crucible. It is where men are seen without armour, sometimes literally. It is where performance drops away, where nicknames stick, where the language becomes shorthand because there is too much shared history to need full sentences anymore.

This intimacy is not accidental. It is one of the defining features of what team sports actually create: a forced, sustained, physically close community of people who did not choose each other but must show up for each other anyway. Over time, that obligation becomes something else. It becomes trust. It becomes the specific tenderness of men who know each other’s weaknesses and protect them anyway.

Sports romance writers know this, and they mine it carefully. The locker room scene is rarely just comic relief or colour. It is often where the hero’s emotional truth is most visible — where his teammates see something in him that he cannot yet see in himself. It is where the reader understands that whatever this man is carrying, he is not carrying it entirely alone. And that, for a reader who has ever felt isolated or invisible, is deeply comforting to witness. The locker room says: there is a place where you are known. There is a group that will notice when you don’t show up.

Safe Masculinity and Why We Need It

Sports romance does something that mainstream culture rarely manages. It creates a version of masculinity that is simultaneously credible and emotionally available. These heroes are physically formidable — large, competitive, trained since childhood to push through pain — and they are also tender. They are also uncertain. They are also capable of being changed by love.

This matters more than it might initially appear. Readers are not simply looking for fantasy. They are looking for permission — permission to believe that the qualities they find attractive in men and the qualities they find emotionally safe in men can coexist in the same body. Sports romance offers that permission on almost every page.

The athlete hero is a particularly useful archetype for this work because his physicality is established and unambiguous. The reader never has to question whether he is capable or strong. That question is answered by the jersey, the contract, the history of sacrifice it took to reach the professional level. Once that credibility is secured, the author has enormous freedom to reveal everything underneath it — the insecurity, the grief, the hunger to be loved in ways that have nothing to do with performance. The result is a kind of masculinity that feels whole rather than curated. Not softened, but expanded. And readers, regardless of gender, respond to that expansion with something close to relief.

Love in High-Pressure Careers

There is another reason sports romance resonates so deeply, and it has to do with the specific texture of high-stakes professional life. Elite athletes exist in a world of constant evaluation. Their worth is measured publicly, repeatedly, in numbers that update in real time. Every game is a performance review. Every injury is a threat not just to the body but to the entire identity they have built around physical excellence. Every season could be the last.

Into this world, romance introduces a relationship that operates by completely different rules. Love — real love, the kind that builds across a sports romance — is not contingent on performance. It does not check the standings. It does not have a trade clause. The heroine (or second hero, in a m/m pairing) who falls for the player is almost always falling for the person underneath the athlete, often the version of him that nobody else in his professional world ever has reason to see.

This dynamic speaks to something universal, which is why it translates so far beyond sports readership. Most people live in high-pressure careers of one kind or another. Most people spend their working lives performing competence, managing perceptions, presenting the version of themselves most likely to succeed. The fantasy that someone could love the unperforming, unmanaged, simply human version of you — not despite your pressures but alongside them, with full knowledge of what they cost you — is not a small fantasy. It is one of the oldest and most enduring ones we have.

Sports romance just has the extraordinary advantage of an unusually vivid stage on which to play it out.

What We Take Home From the Final Chapter

Here is what I keep coming back to, after all the series I have written and all the fictional teams I have populated and sent out into the world: readers do not finish a sports romance and simply close the book. They carry the team with them for a while. They think about the characters on the bus, in the shower, in the quiet moment before sleep. They recommend the book to someone else not with plot summary but with feeling — you have to read this, I don’t know why but it got to me.

It got to them because it told the truth about something they needed to hear. That belonging is possible. That love can survive pressure. That a group of people who did not choose each other can become the most important people in each other’s lives. That being seen — really seen, in the locker room, in the quiet apartment after a hard loss, in the moment before the game when everything is still uncertain — is what we are all, every one of us, skating toward.

The jersey is never really about the game. It is about knowing which side you’re on. It is about having somewhere to come home to. Sports romance understands that. And that understanding is why readers never stop coming back for more.

Why Romance? An Unapologetic Defence

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, Uncategorized, writingLeave a comment

People ask me sometimes, with a particular tilt of the head that I have learned to recognise, why I write romance. The tilt says: you seem like a reasonably intelligent person. You seem like someone with opinions and complexity and a working knowledge of the world. And yet. The tilt is not always unkind. It is just confused. And I understand the confusion, I do, because I have spent enough years in the world to know that romance as a genre has been condescended to for as long as it has existed, which is ironic given that it is one of the most widely read and most emotionally demanding forms of fiction there is. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The real answer to why I write romance is not a manifesto. It is a book. A specific book, in a specific series, found at a specific moment in 1981 when I was at exactly the right age to be permanently altered by it.

The Sweet Dreams series. If you were a certain kind of reader at a certain kind of age in the early eighties, you know exactly what I mean. Slim paperbacks with illustrated covers, girls with feathered hair and earnest expressions, the particular promise of a story that understood — completely, without condescension — that the feelings you were having were real and enormous and deserved to be taken seriously. The second book in the series was called P.S. I Love You, written by Barbara Conklin, and I picked it up and I did not put it down and when it was over something had shifted in me that has never shifted back. From the first page I was gone. Not just into that story, but into the understanding that this — this thing, this particular alchemy of character and feeling and the beating heart of a relationship finding its shape on the page — was what I wanted to do. What I had always wanted to do, if I am honest, because I had always known I wanted to write. Barbara Conklin just told me what.

So I wrote. For years I wrote. For decades, if we are being accurate, which we may as well be at this point in my life. I filled notebooks — not a notebook, not a shelf of notebooks, but a library’s worth, a accumulation of manuscripts that lived in those pages and nowhere else, stories that got the considerable benefit of my developing craft and the considerably less glamorous fate of never being read by anyone but me. This is not, I want to be clear, a sad story. Every single one of those notebooks was an apprenticeship. Every character I tried and failed and tried again to make real was teaching me something I would eventually need. The notebooks were not wasted. They were, with hindsight, entirely the point. You cannot rush the becoming of a writer. You can only do the work and wait for the work to become what it needs to be.

What it needed, as it turned out, was a box set.

I am not going to tell you exactly how old I was in 2014, because I have described myself as a crotchety old lady — well, not that old, I want to stress, merely older than the characters I write, which is the particular occupational circumstance of an author whose cast skews towards the improbably young and athletic — but what I will tell you is that by 2014 I had been loving ice hockey for the better part of three decades and writing romance in those notebooks for nearly as long, and somehow it had not yet occurred to me that these two central facts of my life could occupy the same sentence.

And then I found the Portland Storm series by Catherine Gayle.

A box set. Hockey romance. Hockey romance. A genre that existed, that had novels attached to it, that had been written with the specific understanding that the world of professional ice hockey was not just a backdrop but a character in itself — the culture of it, the physicality, the particular brotherhood of a locker room, the strange, suspended life of a season. I read it and something clicked into place with an almost audible sound. Not just I want to write this, but this is what I have always been writing, I just didn’t have the right ice yet.

My genre, it turned out, had been waiting for me to find it. It had not been waiting patiently — nothing about hockey is patient — but it had been waiting. And once I found it, everything that had come before made a different kind of sense. All those notebooks. All those years of learning to write character and emotion and dialogue and the particular tension of two people finding their way to each other through whatever obstacle the story puts between them. I had been training for this. Barbara Conklin started it in 1981 and the Portland Storm finished the thought in 2014, and everything in between was just the work, accumulating quietly, waiting for the moment it would know what it was for.

So why romance? Because it takes human emotion — the biggest, most ungovernable, most fundamentally important thing we experience — and treats it as worthy of serious artistic attention. Because a love story done well is not soft or simple or slight. It is an act of tremendous faith in the capacity of people to find each other, to choose each other, to be changed by each other in ways that matter. Because the Happy Ever After is not a capitulation to fantasy but a statement of intent: that joy is possible, that connection is real, that the effort of opening yourself to another person can be worth every terrifying moment of the attempt.

And because, if you are very lucky, your genre finds you the way mine found me. On the ice, where it always should have been.

But the evolution from finding my genre to truly inhabiting it took longer than a single moment of recognition, and longer than I can fully explain in one post. It required something I hadn’t entirely anticipated: navigating my own psychology around what it meant to build a fictional world inside a sport that already has a real one.

The NHL exists. It is vast and complex and full of real people with real careers and real lives, and I had to sit with the question of what it meant to write fiction inside that reality, or adjacent to it, or — as I eventually understood was the only honest answer — beside it entirely. My league is not the NHL. It looks like the NHL, breathes like the NHL, operates on the same rhythms and pressures and geography of professional ice hockey in North America. But it is its own thing, fully and completely. The Premier Hockey League.

And when I say fully, I mean it in a way that might alarm you if you knew the extent of it.

Every team has an arena. Every team has a full roster, a coaching staff, a front office, a training staff, a building full of people who show up every day because this is their livelihood and their life. Every player has a family. Every player has a history that existed before the story you are reading began and will continue after it ends. The world did not come into being on page one. It was already there, already running, already full of people going about the business of their complicated lives when the story decided to pay attention to one particular corner of it.

Some of those people are lucky. Their story gets told. You, the reader, get to know them as well as I do — their fears and their loyalties and the specific way they love, the history they carry, the future they are stumbling towards. You get to live in their heads for a few hundred pages and come out the other side knowing them the way you know a friend.

But here is what I need you to understand about the ones you only glimpse: the player who appears in a single scene, the team-mate who says two lines and is gone, the figure in the background of someone else’s story. I know exactly who they are. I know where they came from and where they are going and how they fit into the larger architecture of this world. I know which story is theirs and when it will be told. Nothing is incidental. Nobody is furniture. Every fleeting presence you encounter in these books exists in full, in my head, waiting for the moment the narrative turns in their direction and says: now. It’s your turn now.

That is the league. That is the world. It has taken years to build and is not finished yet and, truthfully, I suspect it never will be, because that is the nature of a living world — it keeps growing, keeps surprising you, keeps producing people who tap you on the shoulder and make clear that they have something to say and you had better be ready to listen.

So. I have told you how it started — a Tasmanian girl, a Sweet Dreams novel, a miracle in Lake Placid, a box set that changed everything. I have told you what I write and why and the particular madness of building a universe from the ice up.

Now there is only one question left. Are you ready to explore the Premiere Hockey League with me?

Snow Business: A Completely Unreasonable Love for the Winter Olympics

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I live in rural Tasmania. Tasmania, Australia. A place that, I will grant you, has more claim to cold weather than most of the country — we are closer to Antarctica than we are to the equator, and there are mornings here that have genuine bite to them, mornings where you can see your breath and the paddocks are stiff with frost. So in that sense, I am ahead of most Australians. But snow? Actual, lying-on-the-ground, Winter-Olympics-calibre snow? That is largely not our reality. The highlands can manage it, occasionally, briefly, with the air of something doing you a favour it wasn’t entirely sure about. Down where I am, we get the cold without the compensation. We are, at the end of it, still an island hanging off the bottom of a continent that considers a cold snap a personality disorder.

And yet, every four years, I become completely unhinged about the Winter Olympics. And I mean that literally. I go nocturnal. For fourteen days I rearrange my entire existence around a television schedule being dictated by a time zone with no interest in my wellbeing whatsoever. I watch things at two in the morning. I watch things at four. I surface briefly into daylight, blinking, to attend to the basic requirements of life, and then I go back to the ice. My family and friends have come to understand that this is simply who I am for a fortnight every four years. They are very patient people.

It started — as so many defining passions do — at a precise, identifiable moment. Lake Placid, 1980. I was watching the Winter Olympics with the particular attention of someone who had not yet been fully claimed by them, and then two things happened that settled the matter permanently.

The first was the Miracle on Ice. If you know, you know. If you don’t: a group of young American college players, assembled by the extraordinary Herb Brooks, went up against the Soviet Union — a machine of a team that had dominated international hockey for years, a team of seasoned professionals playing with the kind of cold collective excellence that seemed almost inhuman — and they won. 4-3. In a game that had no business going the way it did, in front of a crowd that lost its collective mind, in a moment that transcended sport so completely that people who have never watched a hockey game in their lives know exactly what you mean when you say the Miracle on Ice. I was watching. I have never forgotten it. I have, frankly, never fully recovered from it.

The second was Robin Cousins. The British figure skater who took gold in the men’s event with a quality of skating that I — a child from Queensland with no particular frame of reference for what excellence on ice looked like — nonetheless understood immediately and completely was something extraordinary. The elegance of him. The apparent ease that concealed everything it cost. I sat in front of that television and thought: I need to see more of this. And that was that. I was hooked, thoroughly and permanently, and every four years I honour that commitment with the full dedication it deserves, which is to say: all of it, all the sports, all the hours, regardless of what the clock says.

I won’t pretend I don’t know why ice hockey sits at the absolute centre of it all. What Lake Placid started, the years that followed deepened into something that has become genuinely, thoroughly, central to my life in ways I could not have predicted sitting in front of that television as a child. I follow the NHL the way my countrymen follow the AFL or the NRL — with the bone-deep, slightly irrational, entirely non-negotiable devotion that Australians reserve for their codes. My team is the Washington Capitals, and I carry them the way a Geelong supporter carries the Cats or a Queenslander carries the Broncos: with pride, with occasional agony, with the unshakeable conviction that this is simply part of who I am now and there is no point questioning it.

It has gone further than that, even. Ice hockey has wound itself so thoroughly into my imagination that I write romance novels set in its world — stories about the lives that happen off the ice, the loves that form in locker rooms and hotel corridors and the long strange geography of a season, the particular emotional texture of a life built around a game. The sport gave me a passion and then, in a way I find both surprising and completely inevitable, it gave me my creative life as well. Not bad for something I discovered because a group of college kids beat the Soviets in upstate New York when I was young enough for it to feel like magic.

Because here is what ice hockey does that I have never been able to adequately explain to someone who hasn’t felt it: it is fast in a way that bypasses your brain entirely and goes straight to your nervous system. The puck moves as if it has its own agenda entirely independent of the players supposedly controlling it. The hits are seismic. The skill, when it surfaces, is breathtaking — a between-the-legs pass, a save that shouldn’t be physically possible, a goal scored in the quarter-second gap between a goaltender moving and the shooter reading that movement. And underneath all of it, always, is the ice. The particular quality of sound and light and speed that only exists in that environment. I grew up without it and I have loved it my entire adult life, which tells you something about the way sport can reach across any distance if it finds you at the right moment.

But the Winter Olympics are bigger than any one sport, and ice hockey — much as I love it — is not the whole story. Not even close.

The biathlon, for instance, is an event that should not work as spectacle but is utterly riveting. Cross-country skiing is, I think most people would admit, not obviously thrilling to watch. And yet the moment you combine it with rifle shooting — which is exactly as unhinged an idea as it sounds — something magical happens. The drama of athletes arriving at the range with heart rates in the stratosphere, forced to slow their breathing, to find stillness inside the physical chaos of their own bodies, and then to shoot with precision while everything in them is screaming otherwise. It is a metaphor for something, I am sure of it. I am not sure what. But I watch every race.

The sliding events — bobsled, luge, skeleton — terrify and entrance me in equal measure. These are sports in which human beings lie down on what is essentially a tea tray and hurl themselves down a tube of ice at speeds that no sensible person has any business travelling. The skeleton athletes go head first. I cannot overstate how much I think about this. They have seen the track. They know what is coming. And they point their face at it and push off anyway. If that is not a lesson in something, I don’t know what is.

I will not linger on the big air events except to say that I watch them through my fingers, that I am in a constant state of low-level horror for the duration, and that I have tremendous respect for every single athlete who stands at the top of a ramp the size of a small office building and simply decides to go. That is a category of human being I cannot fully comprehend and admire enormously from a very safe distance, preferably indoors, preferably with something warm to drink.

Figure skating, in all its forms — singles, pairs, ice dance — remains among the most beautiful things that sport produces, and Robin Cousins made sure I understood that before I was old enough to know how rare it was. There is a particular quality to the best figure skating performances, a moment when the technical and the artistic collapse into each other so completely that you forget you are watching something that requires extraordinary physical training and simply feel as though you are watching someone feel something, publicly, on ice, in sequins. Ice dance in particular operates on a frequency that is entirely its own. The intimacy of it. The way two people can communicate an entire relationship through how they hold each other in motion. I find it genuinely moving and I have done since 1980, and I refuse to be embarrassed about that.

But curling. Curling.

Here is where I must be honest with you. My love of curling is not rational. It does not require me to hold my breath in fear or clutch a cushion to my chest or say things like “oh no oh no oh no” at the television. It is, on its surface, a sedate sport. Rocks are thrown. People sweep. Enormous amounts of strategy are involved. Ends are played. Points are counted. And I am riveted from the first end to the last, in a way that I find difficult to explain to people who have not yet been converted and fully intend to keep trying to explain anyway.

There is something about the psychology of curling — the way every shot opens up or closes down possibilities several ends in advance, the way a team has to hold its nerve and its patience simultaneously — that I find completely absorbing. The communication between skip and sweepers. The read of the ice. The fact that it looks almost gentle and contains within that gentleness an extraordinary amount of competitive intensity. I have been known to watch the mixed doubles at three in the morning, sitting in a dark and very quiet Tasmanian lounge room, absolutely locked in, because the time zone does not care about my schedule and neither, frankly, does curling.

If you have never given the Winter Olympics a proper chance — if you have scrolled past it, assumed it wasn’t for you, told yourself you don’t understand enough of the sports — I am here to tell you that understanding is not the entry requirement. Curiosity is. Start anywhere. Start with the biathlon, or the ice dance, or the terrifyingly beautiful chaos of the big air final. Or start with curling, and watch what happens.

And if you really want to understand how someone from an island at the bottom of the world ended up here — writing novels about hockey players, losing sleep over Washington Capitals games, watching curling in the small hours with her whole heart committed to all of it — find footage of Lake Placid 1980. Watch the Miracle on Ice. Watch Robin Cousins skate.

You’ll understand immediately. I promise you that.

Why Heated Rivalry Works: What the TV Adaptation Gets Right About Rachel Reid’s Novel

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey RomanceLeave a comment

Rachel Reid’s 2019 novel Heated Rivalry arrived quietly into the hockey romance subgenre and proceeded to break a great many hearts. The story of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov — golden-boy Canadian captain and mercurial Russian superstar — appears simple on the surface: rivals who cannot keep their hands off each other. Beneath that premise, however, Reid built something far more layered: a decade-long portrait of two men slowly drowning in a love they have no language for, no safe harbour in, and no clear way out of.

To understand why Heated Rivalry lands with such force, it helps to know where it sits within Reid’s broader Game Changers series. The first book, Game Changer, introduces Scott Hunter and Kip Grady — their relationship the initial ripple in what becomes a widening circle of queer love within professional hockey. Reid’s particular strength across the series is her refusal to treat any pairing as interchangeable. Each couple exists on its own emotional frequency, with its own humour, tenderness, and damage. By the time you reach Shane and Ilya, you understand you are not reading a formula but entering a world where characters behave with stubborn, recognisable humanity. That specificity — the sense that every character speaks in their own distinct voice — is what makes the series so compulsively readable and so difficult to leave.

The novel is exceptional. The television adaptation, created and directed by Jacob Tierney for Crave and streaming internationally, does something rarer — it doesn’t merely honour the source material, it illuminates it.

For readers who encountered the book first, the fidelity of the adaptation is immediately noticeable. Tierney has spoken about being drawn to the novel’s emotional honesty, and that commitment shows in the creative choices. Significant portions of dialogue appear almost verbatim from Reid’s prose — not as a shortcut, but as recognition that the dialogue itself is the relationship. The deflections, provocations, and rare moments of unguarded truth between Shane and Ilya form the architecture of the story. Rewriting them would have altered its emotional structure.

Where the novel is interior — much of its weight carried in what the characters refuse to say — the series must externalise that tension. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie solve that problem through performance. Williams’ Shane wears repression physically; you see it in posture, in restraint, in the way he watches Ilya when unobserved. Storrie’s Ilya embodies a different sorrow: a man performing effortlessness so convincingly he has almost convinced himself. The accent, the stillness, the timing — all feel inhabited rather than performed.

What the series accomplishes, and what deserves particular recognition, is its refusal to dilute the relationship. This sounds like a baseline expectation, yet remains uncommon in practice. The central grief — the specific grief of men unable to live truthfully inside the lives they have built — is treated not as flavouring but as the subject itself. Their love, desire, and pain occupy the same narrative space as any central romance should. The closeted-athlete story has existed in fiction before, but often from an external viewpoint or resolved too neatly. Here it remains unresolved for exactly as long as it must.

The novel’s great achievement was always restraint. Reid never offers easy catharsis; she trusts the reader to sit with the discomfort of watching two people fail to save each other before they learn how to try. The series extends that same trust to its audience. In a television landscape that often tidies queer narratives into palatable arcs, Heated Rivalry remains quiet instead of declarative. It simply presents two men in love who cannot yet live openly in that love — and treats that reality as the tragedy it is.

There are minor divergences. Condensing a decade into six episodes inevitably compresses some of the novel’s gradual accumulation. Yet the adaptation consistently preserves emotional truth over structural exactness, the correct priority for this story. Its cultural reception — a word-of-mouth success beyond its niche — suggests audiences recognised that sincerity.

For readers, the series is not a replacement but a second language for the same narrative. For viewers discovering it on screen first, Reid’s novel offers what adaptation cannot fully translate: interiority, silence, and years of longing rendered in intimate perspective. Beyond it lies the entire Game Changers series — each book another variation on the theme of love negotiating reality.

Taken together, the book and its adaptation form a rare portrait of secrecy, vulnerability, and eventual honesty. They show both the cost of hiding and the courage required to stop.

Coming Back to the Page (and Reinventing the Journey)

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

So, it’s been about five years, a pandemic, and a cross-country relocation since I last put pen to paper in a blog.

The last time I was blogging, I was living in rural Queensland, running a cat rescue, studying full time, caring for my sister, and trying to get myself organised to release my first hockey romance novel. I had four books of a planned fifteen-book series written, cover art commissioned, and advanced readers lined up for part one.

Then COVID happened — and the wheels well and truly fell off.

We closed the rescue (gaining eleven permanent house cats in the process), I doubled down on study, and somehow made it through the pandemic completing a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Writing and Publishing), a Bachelor of Creative Writing, and then beginning a Master of History. Life was busy, intense, and not remotely predictable — but also deeply rewarding.

When the world finally started reopening, my best friend put her retirement plans into action and purchased a beautiful historic home in Tasmania. The house is nearly 120 years old, sits on two acres, and at one point in its life served as a police station and residence for the officer in charge. We even still have the original holding cells intact.

So, naturally, we packed up our lives and moved from Queensland and the ACT to Tasmania.

The climate shock alone was unforgettable. We left Queensland on a Saturday in a balmy 34°C heatwave and arrived in Tasmania to wake up Monday morning to –7°C and heavy frost on the grass. I was almost sixty years old and had never seen frost in real life before that morning. It was a steep learning curve — gardening, weather, wind, animals, and seasons that actually behave like seasons — but now I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’ve become an accidental urban farmer and am finally moving closer to the self-sustainability I’ve always wanted.

Somewhere in all that life upheaval, my original book series quietly got superseded — at least that’s what I’m calling it.

While the world was locked down reading their way through the pandemic, reader preferences in hockey romance shifted strongly toward first-person narration. My entire series was written in third person — which I’m very comfortable with — but it no longer aligned with what readers are actively looking for in the genre.

For a while, I seriously considered scrapping the whole thing. New era. New concept. Maybe even leaving hockey romance altogether.

Then I stopped myself.

I’ve poured far too much work, heart, and creative energy into this series for it to only ever exist on my hard drive. And, if I’m allowed a tiny bit of pride — I genuinely think it’s good.

So instead of abandoning it, I’m rebuilding it.

I’ve begun rewriting the books from third person into first, and it turns out the changes required go much deeper than simply swapping pronouns. Voice, pacing, emotional proximity, internal conflict — it all shifts. The process has forced me to rethink structure, character arcs, and how each story connects to the next.

That deeper rethink sparked something unexpected.

Out of the restructuring came a new focused arc: The MacKenzie Trilogy — centred on three Australian triplet brothers: Lachlan, Flynn, and Declan. The brothers leave home to move to Switzerland to hone their craft, develop their careers, and ultimately find themselves all playing in the same professional hockey division. Three brothers. Three very different personalities. Three intertwined love stories. One shared competitive world.

This trilogy lets me tighten the emotional through-lines, deepen character growth, and create a strong entry point for new readers before expanding back into the broader series universe.

The trade-off? My original hoped-for June release is no longer realistic. At this stage, mid 2026 is far more achievable — which, honestly, gives me time to properly learn how to navigate the strange circus that is blogging and social media for authors.

So here I am — back at the keyboard, rebuilding stories, rebuilding platforms, and sharing the process again.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Until next time, my friends. 🏒📚