Tag: reading

The Front Office and Coaching Staff: Why Your Non-Player Characters Matter More Than You Think

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

Let me tell you something that took me longer to articulate than it should have.

I have 32 fully named men’s league teams in my fictional hockey universe. Thirty-two. Every one of them has a complete front office, a full coaching staff, and a team support structure that exists whether or not those people ever appear on the page. I have 16 women’s league teams built to the same standard. That’s 48 organisations, each with their own internal hierarchy and culture and the particular human ecosystem that forms when ambitious, passionate people spend their professional lives in proximity to a sport they love.

And here’s the thing I learned somewhere around the third team: the people in the front office are not supporting characters. They are not set dressing. They are not a mechanism for delivering plot information to the players who are the “real” characters. They are full human beings with their own desires and wounds and storylines — and in my Portland universe, several of them are the women who will eventually become the partners of my players. They just don’t know that yet.

That detail — the women already inside the organisation, already doing their jobs brilliantly, already part of the world before any romantic storyline begins — is one of the things I’m proudest of in how I’ve built this universe. It happened because I treated the front office as real. And I want to talk about why you should too.

The Front Office Is Where the Power Actually Lives

There’s a tendency in sports romance to treat the hockey organisation as essentially equivalent to the team itself — the players, the ice, the games. The front office exists in the background, occasionally producing a gruff general manager who creates a trade conflict or a slick owner who causes problems. They’re plot devices. They’re obstacles. They appear when the story needs them and recede when it doesn’t.

This is a missed opportunity of staggering proportions.

The front office is where the actual decisions get made. It’s where contracts are negotiated and careers are shaped and the culture of a franchise is either protected or slowly eroded. It’s where someone is working at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night because the salary cap situation has become genuinely alarming, and where someone else is fielding a call from a sponsor who saw something they didn’t like in a post-game interview. The front office carries the organisation in ways that are invisible on game night and absolutely essential every other hour of the year.

When you make those people real — when you give them expertise and ambition and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about something you can never fully control — your fictional franchise starts to feel like an actual institution rather than a backdrop for romance. Readers feel that difference even when they can’t articulate it.

The Coach Is Not Just a Plot Device

In my Portland universe, the head coach is the father of four of the players on the roster. He and his wife are also part owners of the franchise. Their origin story — how they built this life, what it cost, what it gave them — is the book that sits between my first series and the band series, the gravitational centre of the entire universe.

I’m telling you this because it illustrates something I think is fundamental: the coach shapes the culture of your team more than any player, any general manager, or any owner who stays at arm’s length from daily operations. The coach is the person your players spend the most time with, whose approval means the most, whose disappointment lands the heaviest. They set the standard for what is tolerated and what isn’t, what gets talked about openly and what stays buried, whether the locker room is a place of genuine safety or a place where certain truths are never allowed to surface.

A coach who is also a father — who has watched his own children grow up inside this world, who carries both professional obligation and fierce parental love into every decision he makes — is a character of extraordinary complexity. His authority comes pre-loaded with history. His relationships with his players are never purely professional because the ones who are his children carry everything they’ve ever been to each other onto the ice. And the ones who aren’t his children are navigating what it means to be seen by a man who is both their boss and someone else’s father, someone who knows what it looks like when a young man is struggling before the young man himself has found the words.

Give your coach a life before the story starts. Give them a reason for being in this particular building with these particular people. The coaching staff who surround them — the assistants, the goalie coach, the development coaches — all carry their own histories and loyalties and the particular competitive hunger of people who love the game but whose path to it ran through the bench rather than the ice. They are rich territory. Use them.

The Women Already in the Building

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it’s one of the most important structural decisions I made in building my universe, even though I didn’t fully recognise it as a decision at the time.

My front office contains the owner’s daughter. A massage therapist. A member of the legal team. The marketing director. These women are professionals. They are good at their jobs. They have careers and ambitions and a place in this organisation that has nothing to do with the players they will eventually fall in love with. They belong to this world on their own terms.

The women don’t know they’re going to be WAGs yet. Neither do the men. They’re just people who work in the same building, or orbit the same professional world, and whose lives have not yet intersected in the way they’re going to.

I love this so much because it reflects how relationships actually form in professional environments. Not through meet-cutes engineered by fate, but through proximity and time and the slow accumulation of small moments — the conversation in the corridor after a difficult game, the late night in the office when everyone else has gone home, the moment when professional respect tips quietly into something that makes the room feel different. The romantic tension in these stories is earned because these characters already have a reason to know each other before the love story begins.

The owner’s daughter occupying a professional role in the franchise her family owns is a story engine all by herself. The power dynamics she has to navigate — being taken seriously in her own right versus being seen as inherited authority, loving the organisation her parents built while needing to make her own mark on it — are endlessly generative. The fact that she will also, eventually, have a love story that runs through the same corridors she’s always walked in a professional capacity makes that love story richer, not more complicated.

The massage therapist has access to athletes in their most physically vulnerable state — exhausted, in pain, trusting her with the body that is also their instrument. The intimacy of that professional relationship, conducted with scrupulous ethics and genuine care, creates a very specific kind of tension when feelings begin to develop that neither person was expecting. The legal team member brings an entirely different set of values and skills into the building — the careful thinking, the attention to risk, the protective instinct. The marketing director sees the public face of the franchise and the private reality behind it every single day, and she knows the gap between those two things better than almost anyone.

These are not women waiting to become WAGs. They are women who exist, fully formed, in a world that will eventually deliver them a love story. The love story is what happens to them. Not who they are.

Building Organisations You’ll Never Fully Show

Here is the part of this that might sound like madness but I promise has a purpose: all 32 of my men’s league teams and all 16 of my women’s league teams are fully built. Named rosters, front offices, support staff — the whole architecture.

Most of those people will never appear on the page in any significant way. Some of them will never appear at all. So why build them?

Because the teams your heroes play against need to feel like they come from somewhere. When your Portland players face a rival franchise, that rival has its own culture, its own internal tensions, its own way of doing things — and if you know what that is, even if you never write it explicitly, it comes through in how you write the game, the press conferences, the way your hero reads the opposition. The iceberg principle applies to organisations just as much as it applies to individual characters. What’s visible is only possible because of what’s invisible beneath it.

And honestly? Some of those 48 organisations will eventually demand their own stories. The women’s league teams share that same standard of construction because those players deserve a world built with the same care and attention as the men’s teams. Their front offices have their own politics and their own people and their own complicated relationships between professional authority and personal history. Treating the women’s league as fully real, not as a satellite universe orbiting the men’s teams, was a decision I made deliberately and one I’d make again without hesitation.

Your front office is the skeleton of your franchise. Your coaching staff is its nervous system. The players are the face everyone sees, the story everyone follows — but they are only able to be who they are because of the structure that exists around them, behind them, and long before they arrived.

Build that structure. Name those people. Give them reasons for being there. Let the women in your front office be professionals first and love interests second. Let your coach have a history that makes his authority mean something.

Your readers will feel the difference, even if they never quite know why the world you’ve built feels so extraordinarily, stubbornly real.

It’s because you treated everyone in the building like they matter.

Because they do.

Creating a Home City: Using Setting as a Character in Your Hockey Universe

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a city I love that I have never been able to call home.

Portland, Oregon sits in that particular corner of my heart reserved for things that are yours in every way that matters and yet somehow just out of reach. I found it through a person — someone I love still, someone I will always love — and what we had was real and true and not quite possible to build into a life. The world we were navigating didn’t have the architecture for us. Same-sex marriage wasn’t yet a legal reality, and the immigration policies of both our countries had no interest in making exceptions for two women who had found something rare and were trying to hold onto it across an ocean. We loved each other. We still do. It just couldn’t be what we both wanted it to be.

So I did what writers do with the things they can’t keep. I made it into a world.

Portland became the home of my hockey universe for reasons that are practical and personal in equal measure. I have someone there I trust completely, someone who has been my eyes and ears and orientation on the ground for years — a person who will answer a text at an inconvenient hour to confirm whether a particular neighbourhood smells like coffee and rain or whether I’ve romanticised that detail from a visit I made years ago. The city just felt right in the way that only the truest creative decisions feel right — not chosen so much as recognised.

But here’s what I’ve learned from building an entire fictional NHL franchise in a city I love from a distance: setting is not backdrop. Setting is character. And if you treat it that way from the very beginning, it will do an enormous amount of your narrative work for you.

Your City Has a Personality, and You Need to Know It

The first question to ask yourself when choosing a home city for your hockey universe is not logistical. It’s not about whether the city could realistically support an NHL franchise or whether the climate makes sense for ice sports. Those things matter, but they’re secondary to a more fundamental question: what kind of city is this, and how does that shape the people who live there?

Every city has a personality. Not a stereotype — a genuine, textured set of values and rhythms and contradictions that residents recognise immediately and outsiders sense within hours of arriving. Portland’s personality is specific and deeply useful for fiction. It’s a city that takes its coffee seriously and its politics loudly, that has fierce civic pride alongside genuine social consciousness, that sits in landscape so dramatically beautiful it makes people feel things they weren’t prepared to feel. It’s a city that attracts people who chose it deliberately — not people who ended up there by default, but people who arrived with intention and stayed because it matched something in them.

That personality shapes my characters before I write a single word of their stories. A player who comes to Portland from a corporate, high-pressure hockey market and discovers he actually likes the farmers market and the independent bookshops and the weird little neighbourhood bar where the bartender knows his order by week three — that’s a character arc the city is generating for me, without me having to manufacture it artificially. The setting is doing the work.

Know your city’s personality. Not the travel brochure version. The real version, with its complications and contradictions and the things the locals find quietly embarrassing about the tourists. That’s the version that will make your world feel inhabited.

Specificity Is Everything

Here is the single most important craft principle when it comes to writing place: vague setting feels like no setting at all.

Readers can tell the difference between a city that has been researched and a city that has been gestured at. They can tell when an author has walked those streets — or found someone who has — versus when the setting is a named location with generic urban furniture arranged inside it. A coffee shop in a city you know is a specific place with a particular kind of chair and a view of a particular intersection and a barista who has an opinion about the neighbourhood’s changing character. A coffee shop in a city you don’t know is just a coffee shop.

This is where having someone on the ground is invaluable, and I don’t say that lightly. My Portland person has saved me from countless details I would have gotten wrong — not dramatically wrong, just slightly off in the way that readers who know the city would feel as a faint wrongness, a sense that something doesn’t quite sit right. The angle of the light in a particular season. Whether a character would realistically take that route between those two neighbourhoods. What the stadium district feels like on a game night when the streets are full and the air has that electric quality of collective anticipation.

If you’re writing a city you don’t know personally, find your person. Find someone who lives there and loves it and is willing to be your consultant. Writers’ communities are generous in this way — someone almost always knows someone. That relationship will improve your writing in ways that no amount of Google Street View research can fully replicate, because what you need isn’t images. It’s the felt sense of a place.

Let the City Create Conflict

Setting isn’t just atmosphere. In a well-built fictional world, the city actively generates conflict for your characters — and not just the obvious logistical conflict of traffic and weather and the difficulty of finding parking near the arena.

Portland’s geography, for instance, gives me conflict I didn’t have to invent. The city is divided by the Willamette River into east and west, and those two sides carry distinct personalities and different costs of living. A veteran player who can afford the established west side neighbourhoods exists in a different Portland than the rookie on an entry-level contract scrambling to find something decent in a rapidly gentrifying east side neighbourhood. Their city is the same city but it isn’t, and that difference in experience creates immediate character texture and potential for connection across difference.

The weather is conflict. Portland’s famous grey, wet winters are not just atmospheric backdrop — they’re an active presence that shapes how people move through the city, how they feel in their bodies, how they relate to seasons and light and the particular joy of a rare clear day in February when the mountain appears on the horizon like a gift nobody ordered. A character who grew up in a sun-saturated climate and arrives in Portland for their first November is having an experience that tells you something about their adaptability and their relationship with discomfort.

Ask yourself: what does my city do to people who aren’t expecting it? What does it do to people who chose it? How does it reward loyalty and resist certain kinds of ambition? The answers are your conflict.

The Arena as the City’s Heart

In a hockey romance universe, the arena occupies a special place in your city’s geography. It’s not just a venue — it’s the place where your city’s collective emotional life gets expressed in its most concentrated form. On game nights, the arena is where the city becomes briefly unified, where strangers share a language and a purpose and the particular intimacy of wanting the same thing at the same time.

Think carefully about where your arena sits in the urban landscape. Is it downtown, embedded in the heartbeat of the city, surrounded by bars and restaurants that live and die on game nights? Is it on the edge of the city, requiring a deliberate journey that becomes part of the ritual? What does the neighbourhood around it look like, and what does the contrast between that neighbourhood on a game night versus a Tuesday morning in February tell your reader about the role hockey plays in your fictional community?

The arena and the city should feel inseparable. The arena is where your team lives. The city is what your team represents. When your players skate out for a home game, they’re carrying something of the place on their shoulders — the pride, the expectation, the history. That weight is only meaningful if you’ve made the city real enough to generate it.

Your City Will Tell You Things You Didn’t Know You Needed

This is the part I didn’t expect when I started building Portland as the home of my universe, the part that still surprises me even now with 58 books mapped out and a series bible that has taken on a life of its own.

The city tells you things.

When you know a place well enough — when you’ve loved it long enough, researched it deeply enough, talked to the right people about the right corners of it — it starts to generate story without you asking. A neighbourhood you chose for purely practical plot reasons turns out to have a history that becomes thematically perfect. A weather pattern you included for atmosphere becomes a metaphor you didn’t plan. A geographical feature that just seemed like good description ends up being exactly the right place for a scene you didn’t know you needed.

I think this happens because real places have an integrity that invented places have to work harder to achieve. When you’re drawing on something true, that truth has roots — and those roots go deeper than you can consciously map. Portland’s particular combination of natural beauty and urban grit and fierce independent spirit has shaped my characters in ways I’m still discovering, three series deep into a universe that started with a love story I couldn’t keep.

I couldn’t build a life there. But I could build a world.

And it turns out that worlds, unlike lives, have no immigration restrictions. Mine is open to everyone.

Your home city is not the place where your story happens. It’s the reason your story happens the way it does, with these particular people, in this specific emotional register. Choose it with your whole heart. Research it until it feels like memory. Love it like it’s yours.

Because the best fictional cities always are.

Why Romance? An Unapologetic Defence

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, Uncategorized, writingLeave a comment

People ask me sometimes, with a particular tilt of the head that I have learned to recognise, why I write romance. The tilt says: you seem like a reasonably intelligent person. You seem like someone with opinions and complexity and a working knowledge of the world. And yet. The tilt is not always unkind. It is just confused. And I understand the confusion, I do, because I have spent enough years in the world to know that romance as a genre has been condescended to for as long as it has existed, which is ironic given that it is one of the most widely read and most emotionally demanding forms of fiction there is. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The real answer to why I write romance is not a manifesto. It is a book. A specific book, in a specific series, found at a specific moment in 1981 when I was at exactly the right age to be permanently altered by it.

The Sweet Dreams series. If you were a certain kind of reader at a certain kind of age in the early eighties, you know exactly what I mean. Slim paperbacks with illustrated covers, girls with feathered hair and earnest expressions, the particular promise of a story that understood — completely, without condescension — that the feelings you were having were real and enormous and deserved to be taken seriously. The second book in the series was called P.S. I Love You, written by Barbara Conklin, and I picked it up and I did not put it down and when it was over something had shifted in me that has never shifted back. From the first page I was gone. Not just into that story, but into the understanding that this — this thing, this particular alchemy of character and feeling and the beating heart of a relationship finding its shape on the page — was what I wanted to do. What I had always wanted to do, if I am honest, because I had always known I wanted to write. Barbara Conklin just told me what.

So I wrote. For years I wrote. For decades, if we are being accurate, which we may as well be at this point in my life. I filled notebooks — not a notebook, not a shelf of notebooks, but a library’s worth, a accumulation of manuscripts that lived in those pages and nowhere else, stories that got the considerable benefit of my developing craft and the considerably less glamorous fate of never being read by anyone but me. This is not, I want to be clear, a sad story. Every single one of those notebooks was an apprenticeship. Every character I tried and failed and tried again to make real was teaching me something I would eventually need. The notebooks were not wasted. They were, with hindsight, entirely the point. You cannot rush the becoming of a writer. You can only do the work and wait for the work to become what it needs to be.

What it needed, as it turned out, was a box set.

I am not going to tell you exactly how old I was in 2014, because I have described myself as a crotchety old lady — well, not that old, I want to stress, merely older than the characters I write, which is the particular occupational circumstance of an author whose cast skews towards the improbably young and athletic — but what I will tell you is that by 2014 I had been loving ice hockey for the better part of three decades and writing romance in those notebooks for nearly as long, and somehow it had not yet occurred to me that these two central facts of my life could occupy the same sentence.

And then I found the Portland Storm series by Catherine Gayle.

A box set. Hockey romance. Hockey romance. A genre that existed, that had novels attached to it, that had been written with the specific understanding that the world of professional ice hockey was not just a backdrop but a character in itself — the culture of it, the physicality, the particular brotherhood of a locker room, the strange, suspended life of a season. I read it and something clicked into place with an almost audible sound. Not just I want to write this, but this is what I have always been writing, I just didn’t have the right ice yet.

My genre, it turned out, had been waiting for me to find it. It had not been waiting patiently — nothing about hockey is patient — but it had been waiting. And once I found it, everything that had come before made a different kind of sense. All those notebooks. All those years of learning to write character and emotion and dialogue and the particular tension of two people finding their way to each other through whatever obstacle the story puts between them. I had been training for this. Barbara Conklin started it in 1981 and the Portland Storm finished the thought in 2014, and everything in between was just the work, accumulating quietly, waiting for the moment it would know what it was for.

So why romance? Because it takes human emotion — the biggest, most ungovernable, most fundamentally important thing we experience — and treats it as worthy of serious artistic attention. Because a love story done well is not soft or simple or slight. It is an act of tremendous faith in the capacity of people to find each other, to choose each other, to be changed by each other in ways that matter. Because the Happy Ever After is not a capitulation to fantasy but a statement of intent: that joy is possible, that connection is real, that the effort of opening yourself to another person can be worth every terrifying moment of the attempt.

And because, if you are very lucky, your genre finds you the way mine found me. On the ice, where it always should have been.

But the evolution from finding my genre to truly inhabiting it took longer than a single moment of recognition, and longer than I can fully explain in one post. It required something I hadn’t entirely anticipated: navigating my own psychology around what it meant to build a fictional world inside a sport that already has a real one.

The NHL exists. It is vast and complex and full of real people with real careers and real lives, and I had to sit with the question of what it meant to write fiction inside that reality, or adjacent to it, or — as I eventually understood was the only honest answer — beside it entirely. My league is not the NHL. It looks like the NHL, breathes like the NHL, operates on the same rhythms and pressures and geography of professional ice hockey in North America. But it is its own thing, fully and completely. The Premier Hockey League.

And when I say fully, I mean it in a way that might alarm you if you knew the extent of it.

Every team has an arena. Every team has a full roster, a coaching staff, a front office, a training staff, a building full of people who show up every day because this is their livelihood and their life. Every player has a family. Every player has a history that existed before the story you are reading began and will continue after it ends. The world did not come into being on page one. It was already there, already running, already full of people going about the business of their complicated lives when the story decided to pay attention to one particular corner of it.

Some of those people are lucky. Their story gets told. You, the reader, get to know them as well as I do — their fears and their loyalties and the specific way they love, the history they carry, the future they are stumbling towards. You get to live in their heads for a few hundred pages and come out the other side knowing them the way you know a friend.

But here is what I need you to understand about the ones you only glimpse: the player who appears in a single scene, the team-mate who says two lines and is gone, the figure in the background of someone else’s story. I know exactly who they are. I know where they came from and where they are going and how they fit into the larger architecture of this world. I know which story is theirs and when it will be told. Nothing is incidental. Nobody is furniture. Every fleeting presence you encounter in these books exists in full, in my head, waiting for the moment the narrative turns in their direction and says: now. It’s your turn now.

That is the league. That is the world. It has taken years to build and is not finished yet and, truthfully, I suspect it never will be, because that is the nature of a living world — it keeps growing, keeps surprising you, keeps producing people who tap you on the shoulder and make clear that they have something to say and you had better be ready to listen.

So. I have told you how it started — a Tasmanian girl, a Sweet Dreams novel, a miracle in Lake Placid, a box set that changed everything. I have told you what I write and why and the particular madness of building a universe from the ice up.

Now there is only one question left. Are you ready to explore the Premiere Hockey League with me?

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. 🏒📚