Tag: book-review

What the Broadcast Doesn’t Show

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I know what the score was. I can tell you who scored, which period, how many shots on goal, and the exact moment the commentator’s voice went up an octave because something had happened on the left wing that I was, frankly, still trying to locate.

What I can’t tell you is what it smells like.

That’s the problem with watching hockey from the bottom of the world. I’ve watched an embarrassing number of games this year. Live, when the time difference allows (which means breakfast games, which means hockey with Vegemite toast, which is a sentence no Canadian should ever have to read). Replays when it doesn’t. Highlights on my phone in the queue at the post office. I’ve studied seating maps until I could find my way to Section 112 in my sleep. I’ve read about arena histories and watched fan videos and gone down a rabbit hole about Zamboni drivers that I’m not proud of and will not be discussing further.

Desk research is a wonderful thing. It gives me the bones. The rules, the rhythms, the vocabulary, the names on the backs of the jerseys. It means when I write a goalie tracking a puck through traffic, I know what traffic means. It means I don’t embarrass myself (as often).

But a broadcast is a story someone else has already chosen to tell. The camera follows the puck, because the puck is the point. And when the puck stops, the broadcast goes somewhere else entirely. To an ad. To a panel of men in very good suits. To a replay of the thing I was already watching.

And that’s exactly where my curiosity starts.

What happens in a TV timeout, when the players skate to the bench and the people at home get a car commercial? What’s going on in the building during those two minutes? Is there music? Is somebody on the big screen being dared to dance? Is there a kiss cam, and has anyone ever been caught on it with the wrong person? (Asking for a book.)

And intermission. Eighteen minutes, give or take, when the ice is being resurfaced and the TV audience is being told what they just saw. Where do twenty thousand people go? What’s the queue like for the bathroom, and is it as tragic as I suspect? What does the concourse sound like when it’s full? What are people eating? Who’s selling what? Is there a man with a cowbell, and if so, does he have a name?

These are the things I want to notice. Not the stats. The rest of it.

Because here’s the thing I’ve learned, writing a whole series about hockey players while being, technically, a woman who has never seen a hockey game: atmosphere does half the work in a scene. A first kiss in an empty arena after practice is a completely different scene from a first kiss in a packed concourse with someone’s nachos about to hit the floor. The noise changes it. The cold changes it. The smell of popcorn and ice and wet wool changes it. Readers might not consciously notice any of that, but they feel it, and they believe the scene because of it.

So that’s the plan. Notebook in my pocket. (Millie has already told me I’ll lose it by the second game. Jo has already told me she’ll be the one who finds it, under a seat, covered in something sticky. My sister knows me.)

But I also want to be honest with myself before I go, because I know my own habits. There is a difference between collecting details and forcing every single one of them into a book.

Collecting is the fun part. Collecting is standing on a concourse with your mouth open, writing down “cold air comes off the ice in a wave when the doors open” and “man in a vintage jersey crying, unclear why.” Collecting is greedy and joyful and wonderful.

Forcing is what happens when I get home and decide that because I paid for the flight, every single one of those details is going into the next manuscript, whether the scene needs it or not. Nobody wants a love scene interrupted by an informative paragraph about the arena’s concession pricing. (Okay. Maybe one person. But I don’t write for him.)

The trick, I think, is to collect everything and use only what earns its place. One right detail, the one that makes a reader go “oh, I’m there.” Not twelve. So I’ll gather a mountain, and then I’ll choose a handful.

Which brings me to you. I’d love your help before I go.

What’s one setting detail from a book you’ve read, any book, any genre, that made the whole story suddenly feel real to you? A smell, a sound, a bit of weather, the way a particular room was lit. The detail that made you stop and think, the author has actually been there.

Tell me in the comments. I’ll take your answers to Canada with me, tucked in the notebook I am definitely not going to lose.

Bella x

Big Pro Just Loves to Skate (And Honestly, Who can Blame him)

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In praise of the biggest kid on the ice

I need to talk about Aliaksei Protas. Big Pro. Because I’ve been asked who my favourite Caps are more than once, and every time I get to his name my face does a thing. A soft, slightly ridiculous thing. And I think it’s time I explained myself.

First, let’s address the size. Because we have to. It’s the first thing anyone notices, and it should be.

He is big. And I don’t mean hockey-player big, which is already a different category of human to the rest of us. I mean big big. Six foot six. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds. I have spent years telling anyone who would listen that Tom Wilson is a weather event, and I stand by that, but I need you to understand that when Big Pro stands next to Tom, Tom looks small. Tom. Looks small. I didn’t think it was physically possible. I’ve had to recalibrate my entire understanding of scale.

He’s the sort of large where you half expect him to duck going through doorways in arenas that were very clearly built with him in mind. The sort of large where the boards don’t so much get hit as get notified. And then he skates, and he’s quick, properly quick, and your brain just doesn’t know what to do with the information. Something that big is not supposed to move like that. It’s like watching a wardrobe win a footrace.

* * *

But that’s not actually why I love him.

I love him because every time I watch him, I see a kid. A gigantic, nearly two-metre kid who simply cannot believe his luck that someone lets him do this for a living.

You know the scene in Girls Just Want to Have Fun? Sarah Jessica Parker, big eighties hair, all that energy, the moment where Janey explains how much she loves to dance. She’s twirling a strand of hair round her finger the whole time, and one foot has popped up en pointe all on its own, like her body simply can’t stop dancing long enough for her to finish the sentence. Not because of the competition or the prize or anyone watching, but because it’s the thing that makes her feel most like herself. The thing she’d be doing anyway, even if no one was watching at all.

That’s Big Pro. I am absolutely convinced that somewhere, at some point, Aliaksei Protas has given the exact same speech, just swap the dance floor for a sheet of ice. I can see it so clearly. He’s standing at the bench, all six foot six of him, trying very hard to answer a reporter’s question like a serious professional athlete, and the whole time one skate is drifting out to carve a lazy little arc on the ice, and his hands are twirling his stick round and round, because he physically cannot stand still that close to the ice. His body has already gone back out there. The rest of him is just catching up. He loves to skate. He loves being out there. You can see it in the way he plays, in the grin after a goal, in the way he throws himself back over the boards like he’s worried someone might change their mind and make him sit down. He plays like a kid who got let out early for recess and intends to make the most of every single second of it.

I find that completely irresistible. There’s a lot of cynicism in the world. There’s a lot of cynicism in sport. And then there’s this enormous young man from Vitebsk who looks like he’s having the time of his life every time his skates touch the ice. I’ll take that over cynicism any day.

* * *

And it’s not like he hasn’t worked for it.

The Caps took him in the third round back in 2019. Ninety-first overall. Not exactly a headline pick. He did his time in the WHL, did his time in Hershey (and won a Calder Cup there, because of course he did), and spent a few seasons in Washington learning, in his own words, how hard it is in this league. He even had to wear number 59 for his first few years, because he said he wanted to earn the right to pick his own. He waited until he’d earned number 21 back, the one he’d worn as a junior.

I mean. Come on. That’s a character beat. I couldn’t write that better if I tried.

And then the 2024–25 season happened, and he just went off. Thirty goals. Sixty-six points. Plus forty. His first NHL hat trick. Out of nowhere, apparently, except it wasn’t out of nowhere at all. He’d been working on his skating, and it showed. Pierre-Luc, who knows a thing or two about being underestimated, said the biggest part of Pro’s game isn’t his size, it’s his brain. “Pro’s extremely smart,” he said. He wins battles because he’s in the right place, not just because he’s the biggest thing in the building.

Though being the biggest thing in the building certainly doesn’t hurt.

And what does he say about all of it? That there’s so much work ahead of him, and he’s excited about it. Of course he is. Of course that’s his answer. He just wants to keep skating.

* * *

Now, I can’t talk about Big Pro without talking about Little Pro, because the Hockey Gods occasionally have a sense of humour and gave Washington a matching set.

Ilya, his little brother, also a Caps draft pick, has gone and grown to six foot six as well, which means “Little Pro” is now a purely administrative title. Ilya made his NHL debut last April, picked up a point in his very first game, and this season he’s up with the big club and scoring goals. Two enormous Belarusian brothers in the same jersey, and I’m told that at practice they mostly just yell at each other. Ilya has said Aliaksei yells at him more.

If that isn’t the plot of a found family hockey romance waiting to happen, I don’t know what is. (No, I’m not taking notes. Yes, I am taking notes.)

* * *

Which brings me, slightly sheepishly, to a confession.

If you’ve read any of my books, you may have noticed a pattern. My hockey players are, for the most part, enormous. Not “tall for a romance hero” enormous. Huge units. Men who should, by rights, have their own postcodes. Men who have to turn sideways to get through a door and apologise to the furniture on their way past.

And I don’t seem to have any in-betweeners. There’s no tidy, medium-sized winger quietly minding his business in the PHL. If you’re on one of my teams, odds are you’re built like a refrigerator that took up weightlifting.

I’d love to tell you this is a carefully considered artistic choice. It isn’t. It’s Big Pro’s fault. And Tom’s. And PL’s. And now Little Pro’s too, because apparently the Protas family didn’t think one was enough. I’ve spent years watching these absolute mountains of men play hockey, and somewhere along the way they quietly recalibrated my sense of what a hockey player is supposed to look like. My brain now thinks six foot four is “compact.”

What can I say? I’m a schmuck for the big boys. Specifically the ones who are a bull in a china shop on the ice, all crashing and banging and noise, and then step off it and turn out to be ridiculously, disarmingly gentle. The ones who’ll flatten someone into the boards on Tuesday and be photographed carefully holding a puppy on Wednesday like it’s made of spun sugar. That contrast gets me every single time. It got me in real life first, and it’s been getting me on the page ever since.

So if you’ve ever wondered why every second hero in the PHL needs his own postcode, now you know who to blame. Write your complaints to Washington. I’m not changing a thing.

* * *

So that’s why he’s one of my favourites.

He’s huge. He’s fast. He’s smart. He’s a third-round pick who got there through sheer hard work, and he’s the only man on the planet who can make Tom Wilson look small. But mostly, it’s the joy. Every shift, every goal, every grin, he looks like a kid who loves to skate and can’t believe he gets to do it every night in front of a building full of people who love watching him do it.

I hope he never loses that. I hope he’s still grinning like that in fifteen years.

And if he ever wants to give that speech for real, I’ll be in the front row. I’ll bring the eighties hair.

— Bella

Meet My Boys: Tom Wilson, Number 43

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The first in a little series introducing the real-life hockey players who live rent-free in my head (and, let’s be honest, occasionally wander into my manuscripts).

Hello, lovelies.

You’ve heard me carry on about my hockey boys for long enough that it’s about time I properly introduced you. So I’m starting a little series, one player at a time, and there was never any question about who was going first.

Tom Wilson. Number 43. Washington Capitals. My hockey hero, and he has been since his very first season.

The kid who walked in

The Caps drafted him sixteenth overall in 2012, a big lad from Toronto standing six foot four, and he got his first taste of NHL hockey in three playoff games before he’d even played a regular-season one. Then came the rookie year: all 82 games, three goals, seven assists and 151 penalty minutes.

Those numbers tell you exactly what they wanted him to be. The goon. Fourth-line minutes, drop the gloves with anyone who looked at you sideways, hit everything that moved. And he did what he was asked, because he was so young and so eager and so desperate to belong.

But he was also a kid a long way from home, and that’s the bit that got me. He roomed with Michael Latta, and I can tell you the exact moment I fell. It was the 24/7 special they film every year in the lead-up to the Winter Classic, the year the Caps played the Blackhawks outdoors at Nationals Park on New Year’s Day 2015. In one episode the cameras followed the boys home, and there were Tom and Latta pushing a trolley round the supermarket, then showing off a fridge that was absolutely full of ketchup. Just ketchup, as far as I could tell. They were so young and so earnest, and so competitive about something as silly as the shopping, that I sat there grinning at my screen and thought, oh no. That one. He’s mine now.

Later he roomed with Andre Burakovsky, and if you were around for that era you’ll remember it fondly. The great hulking enforcer on the ice who, off it, turned out to be a big soft thing who’d happily curl up with Harry Potter. Readers, I was done for. If you’ve ever wondered where some of my Pioneers get their marshmallow centres, now you know.

Growing into the A

I won’t pretend he was a saint. There were suspensions, a few of them deserved, and for a stretch his name was a lightning rod for every hockey argument on the internet. Plenty of players never get past that reputation.

Tom did. He kept the edge, because the edge is part of who he is, but he cleaned up the hits that crossed the line and quietly turned himself into a genuine top-line forward the Caps trust in every situation. Have a look at this: as a rookie he racked up 151 penalty minutes and scored three goals. Last season he had 117 penalty minutes and scored thirty. That’s not a goon. That’s a hockey player.

He’s worn the A on his chest for years now, and Connor McDavid (yes, that one) has called him a god on the forecheck. I may have screamed.

Tom by the numbers

  • Drafted: 2012, first round, 16th overall
  • Rookie season (2013–14): 82 games, 3 goals, 7 assists, 151 PIM
  • 2018 Stanley Cup run: 21 games, 5 goals, 10 assists, 15 points
  • 2024–25: career highs of 33 goals and 65 points
  • 2025–26: 30 goals and 32 assists for 62 points in 72 games, his second straight 30-goal season
  • Career (through 2025–26): 907 games, 209 goals, 248 assists, 457 points and 1,649 penalty minutes
  • Contract: signed in Washington through 2030–31

The last of 2018

June 2018. The Caps finally, finally lifted the Cup in Las Vegas, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier about something that happened on the other side of the planet in the middle of my day.

Of the boys who won it that night, only two are still wearing the red: Tom and Ovi. When John Carlson was traded to Anaheim last March, Tom got teary talking about him in front of the cameras, and so did I, sitting on the couch with a can of coke going warm in my hand.

And now Ovi has told the team this season will be his last. Which means that next year, Tom will be the only one left. The last link to the Cup. The kid they tried to make a goon, standing in the room as the one who remembers what it took.

Everyone in Washington seems to think the C is his next. I’m trying not to get my hopes up. I am failing. Captain of the new boys, the ones who’ve never lifted it yet? I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see wear it.

Coming up

Next time I’ll introduce you to a few more of my favourites: Pierre-Luc Dubois, Logan Thompson, and Big Pro and Little Pro, the Protas brothers. Bring snacks.

Until then, go Caps.

Love, Bella x

Why Hockey Romance Works – A completely Objective Analysis

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I’ve been asked a few times why hockey romance works so well as a subgenre, and I have given this question the serious, considered, academic attention it deserves.

It’s because the men are hot.

I mean, I could dress this up. I could talk about the narrative tension inherent in professional sport, the built-in conflict between individual desire and team loyalty, the way the rink functions as a pressure cooker for emotion, the push and pull of ambition and vulnerability. All of that is true and all of that matters and I will absolutely discuss it with you if you want.

But let’s be honest with each other first.

Hockey players are built like someone sat down and said what if a person, but more. They are large and fast and absurdly athletic. They do something genuinely dangerous for a living and they do it with a level of skill and commitment that is, frankly, its own kind of attractive. They get knocked down and they get back up. They bleed for it. They fight for it. Every single game they go out there and they leave everything on the ice, and there is something in that — in the wholehearted, full-contact, nothing-held-back quality of it — that translates directly into the kind of men they are off the ice too.

Men want to be them. Women want to be with them. And honestly, depending on the day and the specific player in question, some people want both simultaneously and I completely understand that.

But here is where it gets interesting, because hot alone does not sustain a subgenre. Hot gets you through the first chapter. What keeps you reading at two in the morning is something more specific than that.

Hockey players, at least the ones I write, carry their hearts in the same way they play the game — all the way. Deacon Worth does not do anything halfway. Neither does Flynn McKenzie, or Lachlan, or any of the men in this universe who have taken up residence in my head and refused to leave. They are competitive and driven and occasionally absolutely impossible, and they love with that same all-or-nothing energy that makes them great at the game. When one of these men decides you are his person, you feel it in your bones. There is no hedging. No half measures. No carefully managed distance. Just the full weight of a person who has decided and is completely at peace with having decided.

That, combined with the fact that they look like that, is really quite a lot to deal with.

Hockey romance works because it gives us men who are physically extraordinary and emotionally all-in. Men who are tough enough to take a hit and soft enough to mean it when they say I love you. Men who are worth writing about and worth reading about and, on the best days, worth falling a little bit in love with yourself.

The men are hot. The rest is craft.

But mostly the men are hot.

— Bella 🏒

Emotional Pacing: Or, Why I Don’t Actually Do That

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I get asked about emotional pacing fairly regularly, and I’ve been sitting with the question for a while now because I want to give an honest answer rather than a writerly-sounding one.

Here it is: I don’t think I pace emotion at all. Not deliberately. Not with a spreadsheet or a beat sheet or a highlighter and a copy of somebody’s craft guide. I don’t sit down and decide that chapter twelve needs a tension spike or that we’re due for a tender moment before the conflict escalates in act three.

What I do instead is live with my people until they feel real to me, and then I get out of their way.

That probably sounds like I’m being precious about it. I’m not. It’s actually the most practical approach I’ve found, because the moment I start managing a character’s emotional journey from the outside — deciding when they should crack, when they should soften, when the breakthrough is supposed to land — it goes flat. Every time. The reader can feel the hand on the lever. It stops being a person and starts being a plot function, and nobody falls in love with a plot function.

Lachlan McKenzie does not have his emotional moments on my schedule. Neither does Flynn, or Declan, or Isla, or any of the Worth boys. They have them when they have them — when the pressure has been building long enough, when the right person says the wrong thing, when they’re tired or scared or finally, finally ready. My job is to know them well enough to recognise that moment when it arrives on the page, and to not rush it or manufacture it or tidy it up into something more convenient.

What that means in practice is that I spend an enormous amount of time in pre-writing just being with my characters. Not plotting them. Learning them. Their histories, their specific fears, the things they do when they’re trying not to feel something. By the time I start writing, I know how they move through the world — and emotion is just part of that movement.

Does the pacing work out? Mostly yes, and I think it works because it’s honest. Readers are extraordinarily good at detecting when an emotional beat has been engineered for effect versus when it grew naturally out of who someone is. They might not be able to name the difference, but they feel it. The real moments land. The manufactured ones clunk.

And yes — this probably explains why my three acts don’t always look like every other three act novel on the shelf. The shape of the story follows the shape of the people in it, not the other way around. Sometimes that means a slow build that takes longer than conventional wisdom says it should. Sometimes the crisis hits earlier, or the resolution is quieter, or there’s a detour that exists purely because that’s where the character needed to go. I’ve made peace with that. More than made peace with it, actually — I think it’s a feature, not a flaw.

Because if every book followed the same emotional blueprint, hit the same beats at the same intervals, delivered the same shape of feeling in the same order every time — what would be the point? We’d all be reading the same book with different names on the cover. The world is considerably more interesting than that, and so are the people in it, and so, I’d argue, should be the stories we tell about them.

So if you’re sitting there with your own manuscript wondering how to pace the emotional arc — maybe the question isn’t when should this happen, but who is this person, and what would actually break them open?

Answer that well enough, and the pacing takes care of itself.

— Bella 🏒

Real Men Feel Things: On Masculinity, Hockey, and Why Ilya and Shane Broke My Heart (In the Best Way)

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Let’s talk about men.

Specifically, let’s talk about the kind of men who get written about in sports romance — and the kind who should be.

Because here’s the thing I keep coming back to as both a reader and a writer in this genre: we do not need toxic masculinity in sports romance. We never did. It was never the point. The appeal of the hockey player, the football star, the elite athlete, has never actually been about emotional unavailability or aggression or the performance of hardness. That’s not what draws us to these characters. What draws us is the physicality of the life — the discipline, the sacrifice, the team bond, the body pushed to its absolute limits in service of something bigger than itself. That’s compelling. That’s romantic, in the truest sense of the word.

The toxicity was never the feature. It was always the bug.

My guys in the PHLu universe are masculine. I won’t pretend otherwise and I wouldn’t want to. They’re big and physical and competitive and they bleed for the game. But they also feel. Maybe not right away — often not right away — but the capacity is always there, underneath the pads and the tape and the persona they’ve built for public consumption. The work of the story, so often, is just getting them to the point where they can access it. Where they can name it. Where they stop being afraid of what it means that they feel things as deeply as they do.

That’s not un-masculine. That’s just human.

Let’s be honest about something, because I think we all know it and nobody in mainstream hockey coverage particularly wants to say it out loud: the real NHL has locker rooms. And locker rooms, when you pack them full of elite competitive athletes performing a very specific kind of hyper-masculine identity for each other day after day — well. We can imagine.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine. For those of us who’ve read The Long Game, Rachel Reid gave us Montreal (the team that Shane has been captain of for years), and Montreal gave us a pretty unflinching look at what that environment can actually feel like from the inside — the background radiation of homophobia that nobody names but everybody navigates, the way it shapes what you say and don’t say, what you show and don’t show, who you are allowed to be in that room. It’s not cartoon villainy. It’s subtler and more suffocating than that. And it rings true precisely because we all know, on some level, that it’s not fiction.

We also know — and this is the open secret of the entire hockey romance genre — that the realistic gay and bisexual representation level in the fictional hockey leagues writers have built is… let’s call it aspirationally high. Gloriously, joyfully, deliberately high. And that’s not naivety. That’s intention. That’s a whole community of writers collectively deciding that if the real league won’t make space, we’ll build our own league that will.

Which is exactly why I have the PHL.

The Premiere Hockey League exists, in no small part, so that my characters don’t have to spend their emotional energy surviving a locker room that wants to erase them. They can just — play hockey. Fall in love. Be whole people. The PHL isn’t a utopia exactly, it has its own tensions and politics and complicated men doing complicated things, but the baseline hostility that testosterone-saturated real-world environments so often produce? We left that at the door. On purpose. With zero apology.

I want to talk about Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander, because Rachel Reid did something with those two men in Heated Rivalry that I think about constantly, and that gets to the absolute heart of what I’m trying to say.

Here are two of the most compelling, most genuinely masculine characters in the genre. Shane — the golden boy, the clean image, the captain energy, the man who has spent his entire career being exactly what everyone needed him to be. Ilya — the showman, the villain of the rival team’s story, the smirk and the swagger and the devastating skill underneath all of it. Both of them, unquestionably, men in every way that word gets applied to athletes.

And for ten years, they hid.

Ten years of a relationship built in secret — in hotel rooms during away games, in the margins of a rivalry that the entire hockey world was watching. Ten years of something real and loving and sustaining, conducted entirely in the dark. Because the culture they lived inside — the professional hockey world, the media scrutiny, the locker room politics, the national identity wrapped up in both of them — didn’t have a box for what they were to each other.

And that is the indictment, right there. Not of Ilya. Not of Shane. Of the culture.

Shane’s image was so carefully constructed, so central to his career and his sense of self, that the idea of cracking it open felt unsurvivable. Ilya, for all his apparent confidence, carried his own weight — the Russian hockey landscape, his public persona, the expectations layered onto him from every direction. Neither of them had been given a world that said you can be this and also be loved openly. So they took what they could get, in the only way that felt safe.

That’s not weakness. That’s two men navigating an impossible set of constraints with the tools they’d been given by a culture that failed them.

What wrecks me about their story is that the love was never the problem. The love was easy, in the end — it had been there for years, it was the most natural thing in either of their lives. The problem was everything built up around them. The sport they gave their lives to. The personas required to survive inside it. The world that had very specific ideas about what a hockey player was and was allowed to be.

This is the real cost of toxic masculinity in sporting culture. Not the big dramatic moments. The quiet, decade-long cost of two people who loved each other having to hide it because the room they lived in had never been made safe enough for the truth.

This is why I write the men I write.

I want to give my characters the thing Ilya and Shane had to fight so hard for — a world, within the pages at least, where feeling things doesn’t cost you everything. Where you can be physically formidable and emotionally present. Where the team bond includes the whole person, not just the athlete. Where loving someone, regardless of who that someone is, doesn’t have to be a secret kept in hotel rooms for a decade.

My PHLu men are not soft. But they learn. They stumble toward understanding their own interiors like it’s a foreign country they’ve been told they’re not allowed to visit. And when they get there — when they finally let themselves feel the thing they’ve been skating around for three hundred pages — that’s the moment. That’s why we’re here.

Masculinity and emotional depth are not opposites. They never were. Sports culture convinced a lot of people they were, and sports romance, at its best, has been quietly and persistently dismantling that lie one fictional locker room at a time.

Ilya and Shane didn’t hide because they were broken. They hid because the culture hadn’t yet made room for them.

I’m trying to write the room.

— Bella 🏒

In Which I Have Thoughts About Hockey Shows

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So this morning I finally sat down and watched Off Campus.

And I have to admit something that may get my hockey romance card revoked:

…I was kind of underwhelmed.

Not because it was terrible. It wasn’t. The production value was there. The budget was clearly there. Everybody was pretty. The hockey looked fine. On paper, this should have been exactly my thing.

But the entire time I was watching it, I kept finding myself comparing it to HR.

And unfortunately for Off Campus, HR exists.

Maybe if Off Campus had been the first modern hockey romance style show released, I would feel differently. Maybe I would have fallen completely in love with it. Maybe I would have been screaming into the void about locker room tension and emotionally unavailable men in compression shirts.

But instead, it arrived after something that already nailed the thing I personally think matters most in hockey romance:

chemistry.

Not just romantic chemistry either. Team chemistry. Friendship chemistry. Banter. Warmth. That feeling that these people genuinely exist together when the cameras stop rolling.

HR has charm in a way that feels almost accidental. Like lightning in a bottle. It feels lived in. Messy in the best way. The relationships feel textured and weird and human. Even the background interactions feel natural.

Off Campus, weirdly, felt more polished and somehow less alive.

And maybe that sounds unfair because objectively it probably is the “bigger” production. Better funded. Cleaner. More cinematic in places. But I kept waiting for it to click emotionally for me and it just… didn’t.

It almost felt like they had all the ingredients and somehow forgot seasoning.

I don’t even know if the issue is the writing. It might genuinely come down to casting chemistry. Hockey romance absolutely lives or dies on whether you believe these people would choose each other in every universe.

If I don’t buy the longing, the protectiveness, the “I would absolutely help you hide a body” energy, then the whole thing starts feeling like actors reading attractive dialogue at each other.

And the frustrating part is that there are glimpses in Off Campus where you can see the potential. Little flashes where I thought, oh there it is. Then it would disappear again under another overly polished scene that somehow forgot to feel.

The boys living in the dorm house almost had it.

That was the frustrating part.

There were moments — particularly during the training scenes — where you could feel the shape of the thing it could have been. The burpees, the exhausted chirping, the half-feral team energy, everybody existing in each other’s pockets twenty-four hours a day… for a second I thought, oh here we go. There it is.

And then somehow it just vanished somewhere between the motivational speeches and the bro hugs.

Which sounds ridiculous because I am absolutely the target audience for this kind of thing. Give me emotionally constipated hockey players living in a chaotic share house and I should be seated immediately with snacks and emotional investment.

But I kept wanting more texture.

More quiet affection.
More stupidity.
More loyalty.
More “this idiot is my family now.”
More moments where the audience gets to live with them instead of simply watching plot happen around them.

And honestly? I think that’s what I’m discovering I want from television in general these days.

I would not remotely complain if every scripted drama on the boob tube (good lord, am I showing my age with that phrase?) was one of the following:

  • hockey players navigating life and feelings badly
  • firefighters saving everybody while emotionally imploding
  • deeply repressed soldiers trying to figure out how to exist in normal society

Apparently that is my entire media diet now.

But I think the reason those stories work when they do work is because underneath all the action and conflict and dramatic music, they’re fundamentally stories about people choosing each other.

Found family.
Loyalty.
Protection.
Love in all its messy forms.

And maybe that’s why some modern shows leave me a little cold. Everything feels so determined to be high stakes all the time that nobody remembers to let the characters breathe together.

I don’t necessarily want less drama.

I just want more love.

More scenes where people cook dinner together.
More exhausted conversations at 2am.
More teammates showing up without being asked.
More “I’ve got you.”
More humanity.

The world is already exhausting enough. Let fictional people care about each other properly.

Also let them do it while wearing hockey gear.

Obviously.

Meet the McKenzies. Your Life is About to Get Complicated.

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

So. The PHL is going live June 15. You know that. You’ve marked your calendar. You’re ready.

But before the puck drops on the whole glorious league, I want to introduce you to the family at the heart of it all — because everything, and I mean everything in the McKenzie Legacy series starts with five Australian kids who looked at their futures and decided to chase them across the world, no matter what it cost.

Let me paint you a picture.

Five siblings. One family. Ambitions too big for one country to hold.

Three boys — identical triplets, because their parents clearly believed in doing things at scale — who grew up dreaming of ice. Of rinks. Of the NHL, or something like it. Of making it in the sport that had absolutely no business being the obsession of kids growing up in Australia, and yet. There they were. Obsessed. Determined. Entirely unstoppable.

And two girls — identical twins — who were born to skate, but not the way their brothers wanted to. Figure skating. Blades and music and the kind of precision that makes your throat tight when you watch it done perfectly. These two wanted it so badly, so completely, that they did something that still gets me right in the chest when I think about it: they gave up their Australian citizenship to compete for the country that could give them their dream.

Let that land for a moment.

Five kids. Five enormous futures. One family watching them all fly away, one by one, toward the lives they were built for.

The McKenzie Legacy is five books. Five love stories. Five characters who carry the weight of everything they left behind, and everything they’re still becoming.

And the first book?

The First Line.

🏒

Lachlan McKenzie. Captain. The kind of man who leads from the front and holds everything together and has absolutely no idea what to do when a woman walks into his orbit and refuses to be managed, organised, or tidily categorised.

Dr Sienna MacLeod. The woman in question. She has not read the memo about being tidily categorised, and she would like it known that she is very busy and does not have time for whatever this is.

I will be honest with you. When I imagine these two — when I see them in my head, which I have been doing for longer than I should probably admit — I see Thor and Merida.

You’re welcome.

He is, in every sense, built like a Viking who also somehow learned to skate. She is all fire and independence and she will absolutely shoot an apple off your head if you give her sufficient motivation. They are, on paper, a disaster. In practice — well. That’s what the book is for.

The First Line is the beginning. The McKenzie Legacy is the whole story — and once you’ve met this family, the triplets and the twins and all the love and loss and history they carry with them, I’ll be taking you somewhere very special.

To the team that sits at the shining heart of the entire PHLu.

The Portland Pioneers.

But first — Lachlan. And Sienna. And the moment everything starts.

June 15.

Cover reveal: May 31. Be there.

🏒 — Bella

It’s Happening. The Puck Drops June 15.

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Okay. OKAY.

I have been waiting to write this post for longer than I care to admit, and now that the moment is here I have approximately forty-seven things to say and absolutely no idea which one to lead with, so let’s just go.

Hi. I’m Bella Bruce. I write hockey romance. Specifically, I write hockey romance set in the Premier Hockey League — the PHLu, if you want to sound like an insider, and you do, trust me — and on June 15, those books are going live.

I need you to understand what this means to me.

I need you to understand that I have been living inside this hockey universe for years. Years. I have populated it with teams and rosters and rivalries and love stories and families so large and interconnected that I have, on more than one occasion, needed a spreadsheet just to keep track of who is related to whom and whether they’ve already kissed. I have statistics for players who don’t exist. I have opinions about games that never happened. I once interrupted a family dinner to explain, in considerable detail, why the PHLu salary cap structure is actually more competitive than the NHL’s, and I can tell you with great confidence that this was not received with the enthusiasm it deserved.

My family is very patient. They are also very tired.

But here is the thing about building an entire hockey universe in your head over many years: eventually you have to let it out. Eventually someone reads it and tells you it’s good. Eventually you find yourself writing a blog post announcing that the whole glorious, chaotic, romance-soaked enterprise is about to land in front of actual readers, and you feel approximately like a player stepping onto the ice for game one and also like you might be sick.

Healthy. Very normal. Let’s continue.

Mark your calendars:

🏒 May 31 — Cover Reveal

Yes. We have covers. They are gorgeous and I have been sitting on them like a very smug hen and I cannot wait to show you. May 31. Be here.

🏒 June 15 — The PHLu Goes Live

The Premier Hockey League. The teams. The players. The families. The rivalries. The love stories that will, if I’ve done my job right, make you feel things in your chest that you were not expecting to feel about a fictional hockey league in which I have an embarrassing level of emotional investment.

If you love hockey, you’re going to love this.

If you love romance, you’re going to love this.

If you’ve ever watched a game and thought yes, but what if the star player was also falling catastrophically in love at the same time — welcome home. You have found your people. I am your people. Pull up a seat, grab a snack, and let me tell you about the PHLu.

My family, bless them, will probably not be joining us. They’ve heard enough.

But you?

You’re going to want to hear all of it.

See you May 31 for the reveal. 🏒

— Bella

Why Team Stories Feel Like Home

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a reason sports romance readers fall hard for team stories, even if they didn’t grow up watching a single game.

On the surface, these books are about hockey, football, baseball, or whatever sport the characters play. But the truth is, the sport is only the setting. The real story—the one that hits readers right in the chest—is about belonging.

Because team stories are about family.

Not the one you’re born into.

The one you choose.

The Locker Room Is Chosen Family

Every team has a locker room. A space that outsiders rarely see.

It’s loud. It’s chaotic. It smells faintly like tape and sweat and whatever someone microwaved five minutes before a meeting. But it’s also where something important happens: people who started as strangers slowly become a unit.

They learn each other’s habits.

Who tapes their stick three times before a game.
Who sits in the same stall every day.
Who always forgets their gear and borrows someone else’s.

They argue. They chirp. They shove each other in the hallway.

And somewhere along the way, those strangers become the people who know you best.

In sports romance, the locker room isn’t just background scenery.

It’s the heartbeat of the story.

Rituals Matter More Than You Think

Every team develops rituals.

The same playlist before every game.
The same diner after late practices.
The same terrible pre-game speech that somehow still works.

These rituals look small from the outside, but they do something powerful: they create stability.

Athletes live in high-pressure environments. Wins and losses can change everything. Careers can shift overnight. But the rituals—the music, the meals, the dumb superstitions—remain constant.

They say: You’re part of this.

And readers recognize that feeling.

Because most of us are looking for those small rituals too. The routines that make us feel like we belong somewhere.

Teasing Is the Language of Affection

One of the most recognizable elements of team dynamics is the teasing.

Someone gets roasted for a bad haircut.
Someone else gets chirped for a terrible playlist.
A rookie gets stuck carrying bags for a month.

On the surface, it looks like chaos.

But underneath it, there’s affection.

Teasing on a team is often a form of acceptance. It’s how players say you’re one of us now. The moment someone stops being polite and starts chirping you is often the moment you know you’ve been fully absorbed into the group.

Sports romance captures that dynamic beautifully.

The jokes.
The running gags.
The way teammates show up for each other when things get serious.

Readers fall in love with the romance—but they stay for the team.

The Desire to Belong

At its core, sports romance taps into a universal human desire: the need to belong somewhere.

Everyone wants a place where they’re expected.

Where someone notices if they don’t show up.

Where their presence matters.

Teams embody that idea in a very visible way. You can see it on the ice, on the field, on the bench. A team only works when every player is part of the system.

Remove one person and the structure changes.

That kind of belonging is powerful.

And it’s deeply comforting to read about.

Why Sports Romance Hits Harder Than Expected

Many readers come into sports romance expecting something light.

A fun story.
Some competitive banter.
Maybe a few locker room antics.

What they often find instead is something deeper.

Because sports romance isn’t just about two people falling in love.

It’s about finding a place where you’re accepted completely—strengths, flaws, and all.

It’s about teammates who become brothers.
Coaches who become mentors.
Fans who become community.

And sometimes, right in the middle of that found family, two people realize they’ve fallen in love.

Not despite the team.

But because of it.

Everyone Wants Somewhere They’re Expected

That’s the real magic of team stories.

They remind us that belonging doesn’t have to be complicated.

Sometimes it looks like a crowded locker room.

Sometimes it looks like a late-night team meal.

Sometimes it looks like a group chat that never stops buzzing.

And sometimes it looks like love growing quietly in a place where everyone already feels like family.

Because at the end of the day, most of us are searching for the same thing:

A place where we’re expected.

A place where someone saves us a seat.

A place that feels like home.