Tag: book-review

Why Hockey Romance Works – A completely Objective Analysis

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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)

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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.

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 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.