Tag: book-review

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.

Coming Back to the Page (and Reinventing the Journey)

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere in all that life upheaval, my original book series quietly got superseded — at least that’s what I’m calling it.

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

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

Then I stopped myself.

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

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

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

That deeper rethink sparked something unexpected.

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

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

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

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

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Until next time, my friends. 🏒📚