Tag: books

Sisters on Ice: Two by Birth, One by Choice, and a Farewell to Ovi

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Yesterday I promised I’d tell you about the trip, and more specifically about the name. So pull up a chair (there’s room in the Smut Hut) and let me introduce you to Sisters on Ice.

On paper it’s simple. Three women, eight days, one very big country, three hockey games and a quantity of snow I genuinely cannot picture, because I have never seen snow. Not once. Not a flake. I’ve also never seen a live hockey game, which, for someone who writes as much hockey romance as I do, is a confession I make with my whole face going red.

We fly into Vancouver at the very end of November. From there we drive to Edmonton for the Capitals against the Oilers on the third of December, then four hours down the road to Calgary to see them take on the Flames at the Saddledome, in its very last season. Then a full day’s drive back to Vancouver for the Capitals and the Canucks on the seventh. Three games, three cities, a lot of highway and, I suspect, a lot of bad car singing.

Will any actual writing get done? Honestly, probably not much. Millie and I have been writing together since the late nineties, and we already know how this goes. We won’t make words. We’ll make stories. Long drives are where we plot out loud, argue about character names, and invent entire towns somewhere between one petrol station and the next. Some of the best books I’ve ever written started in a car with Millie, and I fully expect to come home with a notebook full of chaos and at least three new series I absolutely don’t have time for.

I’m also hoping to bring a few printed books along for the ride, so keep an eye out. If you’re going to be at any of those games, there may just be a giveaway or two.

Why Sisters?

Two of us actually are sisters. There’s me, and there’s Jo, my long-suffering sister, who has followed me into more adventures than any reasonable person should and has never once let me forget a single one of them.

The third is Millie, and Millie needs a little more explaining.

Full disclosure: Millie and I were together once. We’ve been writing partners for twenty-five years, and for a while we were more than that. In the end it wasn’t a lack of love that did us in. It was the Pacific Ocean, and two governments that had no interest whatsoever in closing the distance between Tasmania and the Pacific Northwest. Love will get you a long way, but it won’t get you a visa.

Millie is married now, and happily so. And here’s the thing: when the romance ended, the friendship didn’t. It was too good to lose, so Jo and I did the only sensible thing and adopted her. She’s family now. Not by blood, not by law, but by stubbornness, which in my experience is the strongest glue there is.

So, Sisters on Ice. Two by birth, one by choice, and all three of us about to be very, very cold.

The Uniform

Every family needs something that ties it together. Some families have a crest. Some have a recipe. We needed something we could actually wear, and since this is a hockey research journey (I am saying that with a perfectly straight face), there was only ever going to be one answer.

A jersey.

Three jerseys, three women, one little found family. When you see three women in the stands looking slightly underdressed for the weather and far too excited for people their age, that’ll be us. Come and say hello.

And Then Ovi Happened

Here’s the part I still haven’t fully recovered from. We had the whole thing planned. Flights, drives, tickets, thermals. And then, after all of that, Alex Ovechkin announced his retirement.

Seeing Ovi play in person has been on my bucket list for longer than I’d like to admit. Suddenly it wasn’t just a bucket-list item. It was the last chance. So the trip quietly picked up a second name, and now Sisters on Ice is also the Ovi Farewell Tour.

I’m fine. I’m completely fine. I’ve just booked a separate seat for my feelings.

Over To You

So that’s us: two sisters, one adopted sister, three jerseys, three games and a goodbye. I’d love to know what you want to see from the road. Snow reactions? Arena food reviews? An honest account of three women in a hire car crossing the Rockies? Tell me in the comments, and I’ll do my very best research on your behalf.

Bella x

What the Broadcast Doesn’t Show

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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

My Hockey Players Watch the Same Games I Do (And I’m Not Sure How I Feel About That)

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A small late-night thought that got away from me

I had a thought tonight, somewhere in the second period, and now I can’t stop thinking it, so you’re all going to have to think it with me.

Every time I sit down to watch hockey, my hockey boys and girls are watching it too.

Not in a spooky way. Well. Maybe a little bit in a spooky way. It’s Halloween, I’m allowed.

But think about it. Everything my players know about hockey, they know because I know it. When I learn something new about a breakout or a forecheck or why a coach pulled the goalie with three minutes left, they learn it at exactly the same moment. Their hockey brains are my hockey brain, wearing different jerseys. If I’ve never noticed something, neither have they. If I yell at the TV about a missed call, somewhere in Portland an entire locker room is yelling with me.

Which means my players are only ever as smart as I am. And I’d like that to sound less alarming than it does.

Then it got worse. Or better. I genuinely can’t decide.

Because it isn’t just what they know. It’s who they look up to. My players grew up watching the same players I watch. The rookies in the PHL have heroes, and their heroes are my heroes. Somewhere in my universe there’s a kid who taped a poster of a big, grumpy enforcer with a soft heart to his bedroom wall, and I know exactly who he was thinking of when he did it, because I was thinking of him too. Somewhere there’s a centre who watched a misunderstood ginger find his way home and decided that’s the kind of veteran he wants to be one day.

They’re not just playing hockey. They’re trying to become the players I love. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

I sat with that for a while, and I think I’ve landed somewhere a bit softer than scary.

Because isn’t that just what happens to every hockey kid? Every player who’s ever laced up grew up watching someone. They learned the game from the people they loved watching it with. They copied the celly, the stick tap, the way their hero leaned on the boards. My players just happen to have learned it all from someone sitting on a couch at the bottom of the world, at strange hours, in her pyjamas, with a cat judging her.

So yes, my players’ hockey knowledge is exactly as deep as mine. They’ll make the same mistakes I make, love the same underdogs, and hold the same grudges against certain referees. (They know which ones.)

But they also love the game the way I love it. And honestly? I can’t think of anything better to give them.

Of course, there’s a small complication on the horizon. In December I’m heading off on my hockey research trip (and yes, it is research, I have a notebook and everything), which means for the first time a lot of what I learn won’t come through a TV screen at strange hours. It’ll come from real arenas, real ice, real noise, and real people who know far more than I do.

Which means my players are about to get considerably more knowledgeable, very quickly. About what they can and can’t do. About what they can and can’t get away with. About exactly how close to the line a person can skate before somebody in a striped shirt notices.

I’m a little worried about what they’ll do with all that. They’re already trouble. Informed trouble is a whole new level.

In the meantime, I just need to keep watching. For their sake, you understand. Purely professional.

— Bella

Pierre-Luc Dubois Is a Romance Hero and I Will Not Be Taking Questions

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On ginger beards, bad reputations, and the big man who finally found his way home

I want to start by saying I have tried to be objective about this. I really have. I’ve sat down, cup of tea in hand, and asked myself the hard questions. Is it fair to love a hockey player this much based largely on his name, his beard, and the general impression that he could carry a sofa up three flights of stairs without complaint?

And the answer, after careful and rigorous consideration, is yes. Yes it is. Next question.

Let’s start with the name, because honestly, I have to. Pierre-Luc Dubois. Say it out loud. Go on, I’ll wait. That is not a name. That is a back-cover blurb. That is a man who owns a sugar shack in the Laurentians and is very gruff with the heroine when her car breaks down in a snowstorm outside his property, right up until chapter nine when he quietly fixes her heater and doesn’t mention it. I have named a frankly alarming number of hockey players across the PHL and I’m not sure I’ve named a single one as perfectly as his parents managed on the first go. I’m a little bit annoyed about it, if I’m honest. Professionally.

Then there’s the rest of the package. He’s a ginger with a beard. He’s huge. Not Tom Wilson huge (nobody is Tom Wilson huge, Tom Wilson is a weather event), but big enough that when things get spicy in the corners he can absolutely mix it up, and big enough that the boards make a very satisfying noise when he’s involved. He skates like someone who has made peace with the laws of physics by simply ignoring them.

So yes. The aesthetics are strong. But that’s not actually why I love him.

* * *

Here’s the bit that gets me.

When the Caps traded Darcy Kuemper to the Kings for Pierre-Luc back in the summer of 2024, the reaction wasn’t exactly a ticker-tape parade. If you spent any time in the comments sections (and I did, because I am a glutton for punishment), the word that kept getting thrown around was “cancer.” Locker room cancer. Doesn’t fit. Never fits. Look at his record.

And to be fair to the internet, which is not a sentence I write often, the record was there. Drafted third overall by Columbus in 2016. Moved on from Columbus. Moved on from Winnipeg. Signed an eight-year deal in Los Angeles, had the quietest season of his career, sixteen goals and forty points, and was moved on again after one year. Three teams, three exits, and a story that had pretty much been written for him by people who had never been in a room with him.

I write romance. I know exactly what that story is. It’s the backstory of every hero who walks into chapter one with his walls up and his jaw tight, and everyone in town has an opinion about him before he’s said a word.

And I also know how that story is supposed to go.

* * *

He got to Washington and the Caps said the thing that, apparently, nobody had said to him in a while. Pierre-Luc put it simply afterwards: they told him to be himself, and they’d give him a chance. He said the players welcomed him “like a brother” from day one.

And then he went out and had the best season of his career. Twenty goals, forty-six assists, sixty-six points, all career highs, while Spencer Carbery threw him over the boards night after night against the other team’s best line. Big, heavy, responsible, the sort of player who does the unglamorous work and makes everyone around him better. He anchored a line with Tom and Big Pro that was frankly unfair to look at, let alone play against.

At the end of that season he said it was “the most fun I’ve had playing hockey.” He said the group’s enthusiasm was contagious. He said, of Washington, “It feels like home.”

Reader, I had to put the phone down for a minute.

Because that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the whole thing. The “locker room cancer” wasn’t a cancer at all. He was a man who’d never been in the right room. Some people aren’t difficult. They’re just in the wrong place, with the wrong people, being asked to be someone they’re not. Put them somewhere they’re wanted and watch what happens.

That’s not a hockey story. That’s a found family story. And you all know how I feel about those.

* * *

Of course, because this is the Caps and nothing is ever allowed to be simple, last season was cruel to him. He went down on Halloween 2025 against the Islanders, stayed down after a faceoff, and needed surgery on his abdominal and adductor muscles a week later. He didn’t play again until February. The man who’d just felt at home for the first time in his career had to spend months watching from the press box, in the gym, in the no-contact jersey. If I’d written that I’d have had readers in my inbox.

When he finally came back against Nashville, he scored. Of course he did. First game back, first period, right after Tom opened the scoring. I’d like to tell you I handled that with dignity. I did not.

He was in and out a bit after that and the season never quite let him find his feet. But this year he came into camp and Tom, Tom, called him the fittest guy on the team and said he looked “phenomenal.” He’s been banged up again to start the season (because the hockey gods are petty) but he’s back now, picking up points, setting up Big Pro for a game-winner against Philly this week like he never left.

And today is Halloween. A year to the day since the injury. I’m choosing to take that as a sign the curse is broken and we’re into the redemption arc now. You can’t stop me.

* * *

So here’s my case, laid out plainly for anyone still on the fence.

He has a name that belongs on a cover. He has a beard that belongs on a cover. He’s big, he’s heavy, he’s smart, and he does the work no one claps for. He spent years being told he was the problem, and it turned out all he needed was a team that let him be himself. And the moment he got one, he slotted straight in like he’d always been there, one of the veterans the room leans on and the fans adore.

I loved him from the first mention of him being ours. Not because I knew how it would turn out, but because I’ve been doing this long enough to recognise a hero when he walks into chapter one with everyone already sure they’ve got him figured out.

They didn’t. We did.

Welcome home, PLD. Stay forever, please. I’m sure there’s room on Tom’s line and in my heart. Mostly the second one.

— Bella

P.S. Is he going in a book? Well. I’m just going to say that if you’ve spent any time with Per and Berg Worth, and you’ve noticed how phenomenal those two are, how big and steady and quietly devoted to the people who let them in, you may have already met a little more of Pierre-Luc than I’ve ever officially admitted to. More than a little, if I’m honest. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying I’ve been watching a lot of Caps hockey, and the Worth boys have been paying attention too.

Two weeks. Send Help.

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Two weeks.

Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours, give or take, depending on what time you’re reading this and whether my grasp on the space-time continuum holds up, which frankly I wouldn’t bet on right now.

Isolated releases in two weeks and I have feelings about this. I have so many feelings about this that they have taken up all available storage space and are now apparently spilling out into a blog post at — I’m not going to tell you what time it is. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

Here is what I know: I am confident about this book.

I want to say that clearly and mean it, because it’s true and because I think it matters to say true things even when the rest of your brain is staging a complete carnival. Deacon Worth and Konstantin Andropov are two of my favourite people — not characters, people, because if you’ve been here for five minutes you know that’s how this works — and I have given them everything I have.

But I want to tell you something about how long this has actually been.

  1. That’s when Kon first came to me. Fifteen years ago. Fifteen years of knowing the Worth family, of knowing beautiful, complicated, resilient Kon — which means that what you’re getting in two weeks is not a book I wrote recently and released into the world while the ink was still metaphorically drying. It is fifteen years of a person becoming fully himself on the page.

When Kon first arrived he was already carrying so much. He was being beaten by his father back in Russia. He was trapped inside a system that outed him at a team function — not his choice, not his moment, just the world deciding it owned something that was his to give — and his father’s response was to send him away to the US with bruises and a message that he was a disappointment. Not that he was dead to him. Not quite that. But that he had failed some fundamental expectation, and that was that.

That is where Kon begins. That is what he is carrying when he meets Deke.

And then he keeps going. Because that is what Kon does — he keeps going, through everything, changing and growing and finding himself in ways that fifteen years of writing him have let me witness like watching someone you love become more fully who they were always supposed to be. He has been through so much since those early days. He has shed things and gained things and broken and healed and I have been there for every version of him, and every version has mattered.

I know him down to the marrow. I know what Deke’s hand on his face means to someone who learned early that hands could hurt. I know what as equals costs him to say and what it costs Deke to hear. I know the specific quality of Kon’s courage, which is not the loud kind but the kind that keeps going quietly in the dark without any guarantee of light at the end.

I believe in this book completely.

I am also nervous as absolute hell and I cannot find the off switch for that particular feeling no matter where I look.

And I’ve decided that’s okay. Confidence and nerves are not opposites. They live together, apparently — the confidence saying this is real and it’s good and people are going to feel it, and the nerves trailing off into a low ambient frequency of but what if that doesn’t really resolve into words. I’ve been trying to reign the nerves in for two weeks and I’m done. They have unpacked. They have booked the full fortnight. I’m going to let them stay and focus instead on the thing that matters more.

Somewhere out there are readers who don’t know yet that Kon exists. Who don’t know about the boy who was beaten and outed and sent away and chose, anyway, to hope. Who don’t know what it looks like when fifteen years of knowing someone finally gets to become a book.

I cannot wait for them to know.

Two weeks. I’ll be over here, alternating between serene certainty and low-grade chaos, if anyone needs me.

— Bella 🏒

On Writing Invisible Pain

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There is a particular craft challenge that I don’t think gets talked about enough, and it’s this: writing pain that the reader feels completely but the character never shows.

I want to be precise about what I mean, because there is a version of this that is simply withholding — the author knows something the reader doesn’t, and the tension comes from that gap. That’s a legitimate technique and it has its place. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is something harder and, when it works, something far more devastating. The character is not hiding their pain from the reader. The character is hiding their pain from everyone, including themselves, and the author’s job is to write that hiding so completely and so honestly that the reader feels every single thing the character is refusing to feel.

The pain isn’t invisible. That’s the thing. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way someone doesn’t answer a question directly. It’s in what they reach for when a room gets too quiet. It’s in the joke they make at exactly the wrong moment, the one that lands a little too sharp, the one that makes the person across from them go still for just a second before they decide to let it go. It’s in the way they stand near a door. It’s in what they don’t say when someone who loves them leaves a silence open long enough for honesty to step into.

The reader sees all of it. That’s the whole point. The reader is supposed to see all of it and feel the weight of it pressing against all that careful containment, and understand — maybe before the character does — exactly what is being held back and exactly what it is costing.

Deacon Worth does not talk about his head injury the way someone who has made peace with it would talk about it. He talks about it the way someone who has built a very convincing replica of peace and placed it where the real thing used to be. The reader knows the difference. Deke, for a long time, does not let himself know the difference, and that gap — between what the reader can see and what the character will admit — is where the pain lives.

Kon carries two years of almost, two years of waiting, two years of hope that kept getting pulled out from under him, and he carries it so quietly that the people around him might not notice. The reader notices. The reader is supposed to notice. I put it in the silences and the careful word choices and the things he watches when he thinks no one is watching him, and I trust the reader to feel the weight of it even when Kon himself would rather they didn’t.

That is the craft of it, as far as I understand it. You have to know the pain completely — its shape, its history, its specific texture for this specific person — and then you have to render it entirely in shadow. Not absence. Shadow. The outline of something rather than the thing itself, drawn precisely enough that what it outlines is unmistakable.

When a reader tells me a scene broke them and they can’t quite explain why, when they say they felt something they couldn’t name — that is usually this. That is the invisible pain doing its work. Not invisible because it isn’t there. Invisible because the character needs it to be, and the author loved them enough to honour that need while making sure the reader could see through it anyway.

It’s a strange kind of betrayal, in the best possible sense. You protect the character’s secret and you give it away at the same time.

That tension, held carefully, is one of the most powerful things fiction can do.

— Bella 🏒

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 🏒

On Writing Tenderness Between Men

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I want to talk about something that comes up more than it should, which is the idea that tenderness between men requires explanation.

It doesn’t. But here we are, and since we’re here I’m going to make the case as plainly as I can.

Men are tender. Real men, actual men, the men who exist in the world outside of fiction — they are tender with their children, with their elderly parents, with the people they love who are hurting. They bring cups of tea without being asked. They sit with someone in the dark. They know, without being told, when what’s needed is a hand on the back rather than a solution. Nobody bats an eye at any of this, and rightly so.

So why, the moment two men love each other, does tenderness become something that apparently needs to be justified?

I’ve thought about this a lot, because I write men loving men and I write them the way I believe them to be — which is fully human, with the full range of what that means. Deacon Worth does not become a different person because the love of his life is Konstantin Andropov rather than a woman. He is still a Worth, still led by his heart before his head has a chance to object, still capable of touching someone’s face with a tenderness that costs him nothing and means everything. That is who he is. The gender of the person receiving that tenderness doesn’t change it.

Because here is what I know about the men I write: they are not tender despite being the men they are. They are tender because of it. Because they have chosen, consciously or not, to reject the premise that strength and gentleness cannot occupy the same person at the same time. They are strong men who have simply never accepted the idea that tenderness is something to be rationed or hidden or ashamed of. The ones who have been hardened by the world — and some of mine have been hardened considerably — love with a quietness and a specificity that would undo you if you saw it up close.

What I’m really writing, when I write tenderness between men, is perspective. The perspective of a man who looks at the person he loves — this specific person, this face, these hands, this complicated and particular human being — and feels something that expresses itself gently. Not because he’s performing sensitivity. Not because the genre demands it. But because that is what love does when it’s paying attention. It notices. It takes care. It shows up in the small gestures that accumulate over time into something enormous.

That is not a female experience. That is not a male experience. That is a human experience, and my men get to have it, and I will not be writing them any other way.

They love who they love. They love them tenderly. That’s the whole story.

— Bella 🏒

What Readers Mean to an Indie Author — Or, Everything

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I’ve been trying to write this post for a while now, and I keep running into the same problem: the honest answer is so large that it’s difficult to fit into sentences.

But I’m going to try.

When you publish independently, you are doing something that requires a particular kind of courage that nobody really prepares you for. There is no publisher behind you with a marketing budget and a publicity team and the institutional weight of a known name. There is no guarantee that anyone will find your book, let alone pick it up, let alone stay up until two in the morning because they can’t put it down. You put your work into the world and then you wait, and the waiting is its own particular flavour of terrifying.

And then someone finds it.

I don’t think I can adequately describe what it feels like the first time a reader reaches out to tell you that your characters got under their skin. That they stayed up too late. That they cried somewhere they probably shouldn’t have. That they immediately went looking to see if there was more. It is not a small thing. It will never be a small thing, no matter how many times it happens.

Because here is what readers actually are, for an indie author: they are the proof. The proof that the stories are worth telling, that the characters are real enough to love, that the hours and the doubt and the four in the morning rewrites and the moments of wondering whether any of this is going anywhere — that all of it meant something. A reader who connects with your work is handing you the most valuable thing they have, which is their time and their trust, and they are saying I chose this, and it was worth it.

Readers are also, practically speaking, everything that makes continuation possible. Reviews, word of mouth, a recommendation to a friend, a mention in a reader group — for an indie author these things are not nice-to-haves. They are the difference between a series continuing and a series stopping. Every single person who has ever taken a moment to leave a review or tell someone about a book they loved has kept a story alive. I don’t think most readers know how true that is, or how much it matters.

And beyond all of that — beyond the practical, beyond even the profound — there is this:

You make the loneliness of the work smaller. Writing is solitary by nature. You spend an enormous amount of time alone with fictional people, inside your own head, wondering if what you’re building connects to anything outside of yourself. Readers are the connection. They are the moment the story stops being yours alone and becomes something shared, something that exists between you in the way that only stories can.

What do readers mean to this indie author?

Everything. The world, and everything in between.

I am not being hyperbolic. I mean it precisely as literally as it sounds.

— Bella 🏒