Tag: writing

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 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?

Snow Business: A Completely Unreasonable Love for the Winter Olympics

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I live in rural Tasmania. Tasmania, Australia. A place that, I will grant you, has more claim to cold weather than most of the country — we are closer to Antarctica than we are to the equator, and there are mornings here that have genuine bite to them, mornings where you can see your breath and the paddocks are stiff with frost. So in that sense, I am ahead of most Australians. But snow? Actual, lying-on-the-ground, Winter-Olympics-calibre snow? That is largely not our reality. The highlands can manage it, occasionally, briefly, with the air of something doing you a favour it wasn’t entirely sure about. Down where I am, we get the cold without the compensation. We are, at the end of it, still an island hanging off the bottom of a continent that considers a cold snap a personality disorder.

And yet, every four years, I become completely unhinged about the Winter Olympics. And I mean that literally. I go nocturnal. For fourteen days I rearrange my entire existence around a television schedule being dictated by a time zone with no interest in my wellbeing whatsoever. I watch things at two in the morning. I watch things at four. I surface briefly into daylight, blinking, to attend to the basic requirements of life, and then I go back to the ice. My family and friends have come to understand that this is simply who I am for a fortnight every four years. They are very patient people.

It started — as so many defining passions do — at a precise, identifiable moment. Lake Placid, 1980. I was watching the Winter Olympics with the particular attention of someone who had not yet been fully claimed by them, and then two things happened that settled the matter permanently.

The first was the Miracle on Ice. If you know, you know. If you don’t: a group of young American college players, assembled by the extraordinary Herb Brooks, went up against the Soviet Union — a machine of a team that had dominated international hockey for years, a team of seasoned professionals playing with the kind of cold collective excellence that seemed almost inhuman — and they won. 4-3. In a game that had no business going the way it did, in front of a crowd that lost its collective mind, in a moment that transcended sport so completely that people who have never watched a hockey game in their lives know exactly what you mean when you say the Miracle on Ice. I was watching. I have never forgotten it. I have, frankly, never fully recovered from it.

The second was Robin Cousins. The British figure skater who took gold in the men’s event with a quality of skating that I — a child from Queensland with no particular frame of reference for what excellence on ice looked like — nonetheless understood immediately and completely was something extraordinary. The elegance of him. The apparent ease that concealed everything it cost. I sat in front of that television and thought: I need to see more of this. And that was that. I was hooked, thoroughly and permanently, and every four years I honour that commitment with the full dedication it deserves, which is to say: all of it, all the sports, all the hours, regardless of what the clock says.

I won’t pretend I don’t know why ice hockey sits at the absolute centre of it all. What Lake Placid started, the years that followed deepened into something that has become genuinely, thoroughly, central to my life in ways I could not have predicted sitting in front of that television as a child. I follow the NHL the way my countrymen follow the AFL or the NRL — with the bone-deep, slightly irrational, entirely non-negotiable devotion that Australians reserve for their codes. My team is the Washington Capitals, and I carry them the way a Geelong supporter carries the Cats or a Queenslander carries the Broncos: with pride, with occasional agony, with the unshakeable conviction that this is simply part of who I am now and there is no point questioning it.

It has gone further than that, even. Ice hockey has wound itself so thoroughly into my imagination that I write romance novels set in its world — stories about the lives that happen off the ice, the loves that form in locker rooms and hotel corridors and the long strange geography of a season, the particular emotional texture of a life built around a game. The sport gave me a passion and then, in a way I find both surprising and completely inevitable, it gave me my creative life as well. Not bad for something I discovered because a group of college kids beat the Soviets in upstate New York when I was young enough for it to feel like magic.

Because here is what ice hockey does that I have never been able to adequately explain to someone who hasn’t felt it: it is fast in a way that bypasses your brain entirely and goes straight to your nervous system. The puck moves as if it has its own agenda entirely independent of the players supposedly controlling it. The hits are seismic. The skill, when it surfaces, is breathtaking — a between-the-legs pass, a save that shouldn’t be physically possible, a goal scored in the quarter-second gap between a goaltender moving and the shooter reading that movement. And underneath all of it, always, is the ice. The particular quality of sound and light and speed that only exists in that environment. I grew up without it and I have loved it my entire adult life, which tells you something about the way sport can reach across any distance if it finds you at the right moment.

But the Winter Olympics are bigger than any one sport, and ice hockey — much as I love it — is not the whole story. Not even close.

The biathlon, for instance, is an event that should not work as spectacle but is utterly riveting. Cross-country skiing is, I think most people would admit, not obviously thrilling to watch. And yet the moment you combine it with rifle shooting — which is exactly as unhinged an idea as it sounds — something magical happens. The drama of athletes arriving at the range with heart rates in the stratosphere, forced to slow their breathing, to find stillness inside the physical chaos of their own bodies, and then to shoot with precision while everything in them is screaming otherwise. It is a metaphor for something, I am sure of it. I am not sure what. But I watch every race.

The sliding events — bobsled, luge, skeleton — terrify and entrance me in equal measure. These are sports in which human beings lie down on what is essentially a tea tray and hurl themselves down a tube of ice at speeds that no sensible person has any business travelling. The skeleton athletes go head first. I cannot overstate how much I think about this. They have seen the track. They know what is coming. And they point their face at it and push off anyway. If that is not a lesson in something, I don’t know what is.

I will not linger on the big air events except to say that I watch them through my fingers, that I am in a constant state of low-level horror for the duration, and that I have tremendous respect for every single athlete who stands at the top of a ramp the size of a small office building and simply decides to go. That is a category of human being I cannot fully comprehend and admire enormously from a very safe distance, preferably indoors, preferably with something warm to drink.

Figure skating, in all its forms — singles, pairs, ice dance — remains among the most beautiful things that sport produces, and Robin Cousins made sure I understood that before I was old enough to know how rare it was. There is a particular quality to the best figure skating performances, a moment when the technical and the artistic collapse into each other so completely that you forget you are watching something that requires extraordinary physical training and simply feel as though you are watching someone feel something, publicly, on ice, in sequins. Ice dance in particular operates on a frequency that is entirely its own. The intimacy of it. The way two people can communicate an entire relationship through how they hold each other in motion. I find it genuinely moving and I have done since 1980, and I refuse to be embarrassed about that.

But curling. Curling.

Here is where I must be honest with you. My love of curling is not rational. It does not require me to hold my breath in fear or clutch a cushion to my chest or say things like “oh no oh no oh no” at the television. It is, on its surface, a sedate sport. Rocks are thrown. People sweep. Enormous amounts of strategy are involved. Ends are played. Points are counted. And I am riveted from the first end to the last, in a way that I find difficult to explain to people who have not yet been converted and fully intend to keep trying to explain anyway.

There is something about the psychology of curling — the way every shot opens up or closes down possibilities several ends in advance, the way a team has to hold its nerve and its patience simultaneously — that I find completely absorbing. The communication between skip and sweepers. The read of the ice. The fact that it looks almost gentle and contains within that gentleness an extraordinary amount of competitive intensity. I have been known to watch the mixed doubles at three in the morning, sitting in a dark and very quiet Tasmanian lounge room, absolutely locked in, because the time zone does not care about my schedule and neither, frankly, does curling.

If you have never given the Winter Olympics a proper chance — if you have scrolled past it, assumed it wasn’t for you, told yourself you don’t understand enough of the sports — I am here to tell you that understanding is not the entry requirement. Curiosity is. Start anywhere. Start with the biathlon, or the ice dance, or the terrifyingly beautiful chaos of the big air final. Or start with curling, and watch what happens.

And if you really want to understand how someone from an island at the bottom of the world ended up here — writing novels about hockey players, losing sleep over Washington Capitals games, watching curling in the small hours with her whole heart committed to all of it — find footage of Lake Placid 1980. Watch the Miracle on Ice. Watch Robin Cousins skate.

You’ll understand immediately. I promise you that.