Tag: mental-health

Why Protective Characters Work — And It’s Not About the Bullets

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There is a version of the protective character that I think gets written more than it should — the one who throws himself in front of danger, who takes the hit, who stands between the person he loves and whatever catastrophic thing is bearing down on them. Dramatic. Cinematic. Occasionally genuinely moving.

But that is not, I would argue, why protective characters actually work.

That is not why we fall for them.

We fall for them because of the other thing. The small thing. The thing that costs nothing except attention and communicates everything.

The walking on the gutter side of the footpath.

If you know, you know — and if you’ve ever walked beside someone who quietly repositioned themselves so they were between you and the traffic without making anything of it, without announcing it or expecting acknowledgement, you know exactly what I mean when I say that small gesture lands harder than any dramatic sacrifice. It is not about the cars. It has never been about the cars. It is about the fact that someone is thinking about you, specifically, in the small and constant way that love actually looks like in real life.

Hold that thought. That is the whole thesis.

The umbrella tilted toward you in the rain while they get rained on. The hand that appears at the small of your back in a crowd, not possessively, just — I know where you are, I have you. The coffee that appears on your desk because they noticed you hadn’t eaten. The door they get to first. The coat they put around your shoulders before you’ve realised you’re cold.

None of these things require heroism. All of them require the same thing, which is paying attention. Which is caring enough about one specific person to notice what they need before they name it, and then quietly providing it without requiring a medal for the effort.

That is what Deacon Worth does. Not perfectly — he is a Worth, which means he is also occasionally overprotective in the ways that require a conversation, and Kon has opinions about this and is not shy about sharing them. But underneath all of that, underneath the big gestures and the hard moments, Deke is a man who notices. Who repositions himself between Kon and the cold wind without thinking about it. Who tracks where Kon is in a room not out of possession but out of the same instinct that makes you keep half an eye on the person you love in a crowd, just to know they’re there and fine and not needing you for anything but available to need you if they do.

That is the protective character that works. Not the one with the heroic sacrifice — or not only that one, not only in the dramatic moment. The one who has quietly decided that your comfort and safety and ease are worth their ongoing attention. The one for whom protection is not an event but a habit, built so deeply into how they love that they don’t even notice they’re doing it half the time.

We notice, though.

Readers notice. Because most of us have been cold in a crowd and wished someone would put a coat around our shoulders. Most of us have walked on the traffic side ourselves and wondered what it would feel like if someone just, without comment, moved us gently to the inside.

It is such a small thing.

It is the whole thing.

— Bella 🏒

On Found Family and the Teams We Build

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the things I love most about writing hockey romance is the thing that was true about hockey long before I started writing it: the team is always, already, a family.

Not always a comfortable one. Not always a quiet one. Families rarely are. But a family in the truest sense — people who did not choose each other initially and who, through the specific alchemy of proximity and pressure and shared purpose, become something to each other that has no cleaner name than that.

The PHL has its blood families, of course. Brothers who came up through the same system, who learned to skate in the same backyard, who ended up on the same roster because the talent ran in the same veins. Fathers whose sons are now playing the game they played a generation before, sometimes for the same organisation, sometimes facing each other across a faceoff dot with the specific complicated weight of all that history between them. Those stories are real and they are rich and they are part of the fabric of the league.

But they’re only part of it.

What gets me every time — what got me long before I started building the PHLu universe, when I was just a reader falling in love with this sport — is the found family. The one that forms inside a locker room and on a bench and on a bus between cities at two in the morning. The one that happens because these men spend more time together than they spend with the people who chose them by love or marriage or blood. You cannot be that present in each other’s lives without becoming something. The question is only what shape the something takes.

Sometimes it’s the veteran who takes the rookie under his wing and teaches him how to survive the league and doesn’t say a word about it to anyone. Sometimes it’s the line that develops the specific shorthand of people who have been reading each other’s bodies on the ice for long enough that the communication happens below language. Sometimes it’s the goalie and his defense, who have a relationship that the rest of the team watches and cannot fully explain and does not try to.

And sometimes — and this is the one that breaks my heart open in the best possible way — you find the small family within the family. The cluster of three or four or five players who have become something specific to each other inside the larger something of the team. The ones who have each other’s emergency contacts. The ones who show up. The ones for whom ‘teammate’ stopped being the right word somewhere around the second season and nobody has quite found the better one yet.

The PHLu is full of them. The Worth family gave Portland its backbone — real brothers, real history, the complicated grace of people who grew up together and are now performing the same work in front of crowds — but they are not the whole of what the Portland Pioneers are. The Pioneers are also every player who walked into that locker room without a single person who belonged to him and found, slowly and then all at once, that he had a room full of them.

That’s the story I keep coming back to. Not the blood families — though I love them — but the ones that built themselves from scratch, in the middle of a season, in the specific hothouse of a roster that has to function as one thing while being made of very many different and individual people.

It doesn’t take long, in hockey, to find the small families within teams. They’re always there if you look.

I have been looking for a long time. I am still finding them.

🏒 — Bella

They’re Real, They’re Actually Real

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I have been sitting with this image for approximately twenty minutes and I cannot stop looking at it.

This is Deacon Worth and Konstantin Andropov. Number 43 and number 27. Portland Pioneers. My boys.

If you have been following along with the PHLu universe, you know Deke and Kon. You know the goal crease and the press conference and the year that changed everything and the specific, particular way these two found their way to each other on the ice and off it. You have lived inside their story with me. And now Paul — our incredible artist who has given visual life to all three of my universes — has given them a face.

I cannot tell you how close this is to what I saw when I wrote them. That is not a thing I expected to be able to say. You write a character and you have them in your head in the specific way that fictional people live in an author’s head — vivid and particular and entirely yours — and then someone else tries to render them and the gap between the interior version and the external version is usually where you learn to manage your expectations.

There is no gap here. None. This is Deke. This is Kon. The way they are standing, the way Kon is leaning in, the specific quality of how they are with each other — this is the book, made visible.

Isolated releases June 15.

Cover reveal June 5.

If you’d like to be notified the moment that cover drops — and I think you would like that, I think you would very much like that — watch this space. I am barely containing myself and I have known what the cover looks like.

You are going to love them. I already do, obviously. I have for quite some time.

🏒 — Bella