books – thestationhousenotebook

A Research Trip. It Is A Research Trip. I Am Going To Keep Saying That.

Right. So I mentioned in the last post that something specific was coming, and that it explained the thermal underwear, and that I’d tell you about it properly another time.

This is another time.

We’re going to Canada.

We leave on the 30th of November. And before anyone gets excited on my behalf, I want to be very clear about the nature of this undertaking: it is a research trip. Wholly and entirely undertaken in support of my writing. There is no other reason. I have thought about it from several angles and I am confident this framing holds.

Here is the itinerary. You may draw your own conclusions and I would ask that you keep them to yourself.

November 30. We leave. Out of home and up to Sydney first, because you cannot simply leave from here. Nothing simply leaves from here. Getting off this island is a process with stages.

Then Auckland, and from Auckland to Vancouver, across an ocean that I have looked at on a map several times now and which does not get smaller no matter how long I stare.

And we arrive on November 30. The same November 30. We cross the international date line and it hands the day back to us like we’d left it on the counter. I have had this explained to me. I have nodded along. I have subsequently tried to explain it to someone else and heard my own voice tail off halfway through. I am simply going to get on the plane and let it happen to me.

Eight days on the ground. Which sounds generous until you see what we’ve done with them.

Because here is the actual shape of it.

We land in Vancouver. Then we get in a car and drive to Edmonton — which, for the locals playing along, is not a little jaunt. It is a proper day of driving. In December. In Canada.

We’re driving to Edmonton to watch the Washington Capitals play the Oilers on the 3rd.

Now, I want to be clear that I have credentials here. I have done Brisbane to Geelong to catch the Spirit — nineteen hours, one stage, no sensible stopping — and I have done it twelve times, which I think we can all agree is eleven times more than any reasonable person would. So I’m not frightened of a long drive. Long drives and I have an understanding.

But every single one of those nineteen-hour runs, the only chill involved was the air conditioning set to nipsicle. That’s my entire experience of being cold in a car: self-inflicted, reversible, and available at the touch of a dial. I have never once driven through weather that was trying to kill me. I suspect there is a meaningful difference between “big” and “big and also frozen“, and I am about to learn it personally, in the dark, somewhere in Alberta.

The next morning we get back in the car and go four hours to Calgary, where on the 5th we watch the Capitals play the Flames — in the Saddledome, in its final year. That one matters to me more than I expected it to. Buildings like that don’t get replaced, they get succeeded, and there’s a particular ache in walking into a place while you still can. I fully intend to be embarrassing about it.

And then another full day’s drive back to Vancouver, where on the 7th — and you will never guess this — we watch the Capitals play the Canucks.

The day after that, we fly home.

So to summarise: I am flying roughly as far as it is possible to fly, in order to sit in three different buildings in three different cities across five days and watch the same team play hockey, with two enormous drives wedged in between, and then I am immediately coming home again.

Research.

I write hockey romance. I have written a great deal of hockey romance. And I want to put something on the record here, plainly, because it is the single most damning sentence in this entire post:

I have never once set foot inside a hockey arena.

Not once. Never. I have written arenas I have never stood in. Road trips I have never taken. Rooms I have never smelled. The specific quality of cold that comes off the ice and settles on your forearms — I have described that with enormous confidence on the basis of absolutely nothing but video footage and the reports of kinder, better-travelled people.

At some point a person has to go and check.

That’s my story. I’m sticking to it. My accountant may have questions and I am prepared for them.

The other thing — the real thing, if I’m honest — is who I’m doing it with.

Karen is American, and she and I have been at this together since somewhere around 1998. That’s not a typo. That is longer than some of you have been alive, and it is certainly longer than any sensible person maintains a correspondence about imaginary people.

She has been through forty-eight of my novels. Forty-eight. Forty-five of which have never seen daylight outside my own very small circle — which is to say, outside Karen and Jo. There are manuscripts on my hard drive that only two other human beings on this planet have ever read, and both of those human beings will be in the car with me in December.

There are days I’m not entirely convinced Karen and I aren’t operating on the same brain with a very bad connection between the halves.

And in all those years we have conducted the entire relationship across a time difference that has never once been convenient for either of us. In December we will be in the same country. The same car. The same building. At the same time.

The plan — and I use that word loosely — is that in the down times we’ll get some words down. Between drives. In the evenings. In airports.

I want to be honest with you about how likely that is.

We will write. We will absolutely write. What we will not do is make words. There’s a difference, and if you’re one of us you already know it: making words is the part where you sit down and put sentences in a document and it is work. Making stories is the other thing. It’s two people in a car for eleven hours going but what if he doesn’t tell her and no, wait, go back, what if it’s the brother and building an entire cathedral of plot out loud that neither of you writes down, and both of you remember perfectly two years later.

We’re going to come home with a folder containing one paragraph and a list of things we’re definitely going to write about later. And it will have been the most productive trip of my life.

And Jo is coming with us — I’ve just realised I hadn’t mentioned that — which means there will be a third person in that car, listening to two grown women argue passionately about the motivations of people who do not exist. She’ll smile in that way she does. The perplexed one. The one that says I love you both and I have no idea what is happening here. Jo has read the forty-five too, mind you. She knows exactly who we’re arguing about. She simply retains the ability to be normal about it, which is a gift neither Karen nor I have ever possessed.

We’re bringing the laptops. On principle.

The cats, meanwhile, will be furious. Fifteen of them, abandoned in the run-up to Christmas, with no regard for their feelings. In my defence there is a shed out the back containing over a thousand cans of cat food, which in hindsight makes the August boat trip look less like an unhinged errand and more like strategic forward planning.

I’d like that noted too.

The Closest I Ever Got to Sam Neill

Vale Sam.

Sam Neill has died, and I find myself unexpectedly wanting to sit down and tell you all a story.

He gave us so many good films over the years — more than I could possibly list, and every one of you will have your own favourite tucked away somewhere. Jurassic Park, obviously. The Piano. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. That particular brand of dry, watchful, slightly rumpled charm he brought to everything, where you always got the sense he found the whole business of being a film star faintly ridiculous and was quietly enjoying the joke. I liked him enormously, in the way you like someone you’ve never met but have watched be excellent for forty years.

But my best memory of the man isn’t from a screen at all. It’s from a paddock in New Zealand, and it remains, to this day, one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes.

Let me set the scene for you.

Some years back I was on a Lord of the Rings tour through New Zealand. Now, I want to be clear about the calibre of people I was travelling with, because it matters enormously to what follows. We were not casual fans. We were not there to nod politely at a nice view, buy a fridge magnet, and be back at the hotel in time for the buffet. This was a fully immersive pilgrimage, and it was run like one.

The days were long. We’d often be up and moving before sunrise and still going late into the night, chasing the light, chasing the locations, chasing the exact spot where a thing had happened in a film that, to us, had rather more authority than most historical records. And here is the detail I really need you to sit with: a good number of my fellow travellers would set their alarms an hour earlier than they strictly had to — sacrificing sleep they desperately needed — purely so they could don their ears and their wigs, strap on their fake feet, and assemble each individual, painstakingly recreated piece of costuming, so that they might walk the paths of their chosen race properly attired. Not for a photo. Not for a laugh. For the integrity of the experience.

That was the calibre of devotion on that coach.

And it wasn’t only the dressing-up, either. This was a serious tour — run by Red Carpet Tours, in fact, and this same crew, plus or minus a few faces, has now done the whole pilgrimage twice — and it opened serious doors. We had lunch with the producers. We sat in on classes with the make-up artists who’d done the real thing. Weta Workshop opened their doors to us and let us stand among the actual artistry of it all. We were, in short, known. We were followed around by newspapers — and yes, I’m dating myself here, but this was back when newspapers were printed on paper and a photographer would trail a busload of costumed adults across the countryside because it made for a genuinely good story.

And speaking of photographs: when our group of twenty-five descended on Hobbiton, we came away with over twelve thousand photos between us. Twelve thousand. From one visit. To one location. We used to joke that no tour group on earth had ever documented a patch of ground so thoroughly — that entire professional survey teams had mapped smaller areas with fewer images. Every door of every hobbit hole. Every cabbage. Every artfully placed tiny wheelbarrow. If it existed in the Shire, we have it archived in triplicate from four angles.

Now, I’ll be honest with you: not every one of us was quite that far gone. There were some of us — and I count myself gently among this number — who were deeply, sincerely committed to the books and the films, but who had perhaps not crossed fully into the fake-feet-before-dawn tier of devotion. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I have nothing but love and admiration for the pre-sunrise wig people. I simply also enjoy sleep.) But committed tragics, one and all. That’s the important part. Whether we were in full regalia or merely in spirit, we took our roles seriously. Possibly too seriously. Definitely too seriously.

And lest you think I’m exaggerating the depth of it for comic effect — I’m really not. Here is the proof of the pudding: two of our bravest of men, the very fellows who served as our tour’s own Boromir and Aragorn, now work for Weta as weaponsmiths. Actual weaponsmiths. Forging the actual blades. And two of our hobbits went on to join Weta as costume experts. Four of the people on that coach were so genuinely, unshakeably good at this that the wizards behind the curtain took one look and hired them. So when I tell you we were a serious bunch, please understand I am not being cute about it. We were a pipeline.

So there we were, early one particular morning, being told with a certain amount of ceremony by our lovely guide that this afternoon we’d be making a special stop at Sam Neill’s favourite café. Not far, apparently, from his winery. There was a pause, clearly designed for a ripple of excited murmuring to pass through the coach.

The ripple did not come.

We took this news entirely in our stride and carried on regardless, because — and I say this with the greatest affection and no small amount of shame — poor Sam meant very little to a coachful of Tolkien obsessives. We had bigger fish to fry. We had Rohan to think about. This was a group that would rise before dawn to correctly attach a pair of pointed ears; a café patronised by a knighted New Zealand screen legend simply could not compete, in that moment, with the promise of another paddock that had once, briefly, in a certain light, been Middle-earth.

I’m not proud of it. But I’m not going to lie to you either.

When we finally arrived, the group split neatly in two. Some of us descended on the café like a clan of hobbits who’d caught the scent of second breakfast and would not be stopped by man nor Nazgûl. And a few of us — myself included — stayed behind on the coach.

Now, in my defence, I had earned that rest. We all had. It had been a big day. We had made the climb up to the site of the Golden Hall — where Éowyn stands watching the riders return to Rohan — and stood at the top waving the very flag the Fellowship carried, the wind doing its level best to tear it out of our hands. And here is the part that still makes me laugh: I found that climb genuinely difficult in ordinary human shoes, with ankles and arch support and all the advantages of modern footwear. The hobbits did it in silicone hairy feet. Silicone hairy feet. Up a steep, windswept hillside. And they did it without complaint, because to complain would have been to break character, and one does not break character on the paths of one’s chosen race. I have never simultaneously respected and worried about a group of people more.

We had also recreated the Charge of the Rohirrim across a hillside with more commitment than dignity. And we had spent a genuinely alarming amount of time on our hands and knees searching for Pippin’s Elven brooch, which one of our number had dropped and which had assumed, in our collective imagination, the significance of an actual plot point. We were spent. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. We slumped in our coach seats like the survivors of a great battle, which, in our heads, we absolutely were.

Little did we know that we — the exhausted, the seated, the ones who couldn’t be bothered — were about to receive the revelation of the entire tour.

Because as we sat there, a battered old SUV pulled up a little way off from the coaches. Nothing flash. The sort of car a man drives when he has nothing to prove to anybody and a winery to get back to. And out of it climbed a man.

I will never know precisely what tipped him off. I’ve turned it over many times since, and I like to imagine it unfolded slowly, the way dread always does in the films he was so good in.

Perhaps it was the fellow in full Boromir regalia, sword and all, slurping contentedly on a vanilla latte outside the café. Perhaps it was the Elven princess serenely demolishing a vanilla slice, crumbs cascading down her ethereal robes. But more likely — almost certainly — it was the three ginger hobbits who chose that exact moment to come clomping merrily out of his favourite café on their great fake hairy feet, chattering away, utterly at home.

Whatever it was, I watched it land.

The man went still. He slowly reached up and took off his glasses. And his eyes went wide — and I need you to understand that this was not a general sort of wide. This was specific. This was, to the millimetre, the exact expression Dr Alan Grant wears when he first stands up in that jeep and claps eyes on the dinosaurs. That pure, silent, slack-jawed awe. That “we’re going to make a fortune with this place” face. Except in reverse. Except the wonder was horror, and the dinosaurs were us.

And then, without a single word, Sam Neill — knight of the realm, national treasure, the man whose café this was — gently sank back down into his battered SUV, quietly closed the door, and reversed out of there in a magnificent cloud of gravel dust. Gone. Vanished. Fled his own regular haunt rather than face a busload of feral Tolkien enthusiasts eating pastries in cosplay.

I have never respected a man’s survival instincts more.

That was the closest I ever got to Sam Neill. Not a handshake. Not an autograph. Not even a hello. Just the fleeting, unforgettable privilege of watching a genuine legend decide, in real time, that whatever was happening at his café today was Not For Him — and remove himself from it with the speed and decisiveness of a man who has clearly outrun a velociraptor before and knows exactly how these things go.

And do you know what? I wouldn’t trade it. A handshake, I’d have forgotten. That, I have dined out on for years.

Rest easy, Sam. Thank you for the films, thank you for the wine you probably poured extra generously the moment you got home that afternoon, and thank you — most of all — for the retreat. You clocked the situation, you made the right call, and you got out clean.

Life, uh, finds a way. 🍷

Frightful Weather, Small Consolations, and Amazon Being a Dragon

The weather today was, in a word, awful.

In more words: the rain was insistent and relentless and entirely without charm, the kind of rain that doesn’t have the decency to be dramatic about it and just settles in with its bags unpacked and its feet up, prepared to stay indefinitely. There was nothing delightful about any of it and I say that as someone who does not, in principle, object to rain. This was not rain you could enjoy from a window with a cup of tea. This was rain that was making a point.

I had to go to town anyway because groceries do not materialise simply because the weather is demoralising, and the drive was exactly as hairy as the sky promised it would be. I made it there. I made it back. The house was rewarded for this act of meteorological bravery with Subway for dinner, which is not nothing. Some days the consolation prize is genuinely consoling.

The cross stitch subscription box arrived, which is exciting and being treated accordingly — which is to say it’s sitting there looking full of potential while I decide the right moment to open it properly. These things deserve the right moment. I’ll know it when I find it.

In the meantime I have been making a colouring book.

This is for the Meandering Book Nook — the wandering bookshop project, for those just joining us — and I’m not entirely sure yet whether it will become a regular fixture or whether it will remain an occasional thing. My instinct says occasional themed colouring books are probably going to be a permanent feature of the Nook’s life, because they feel right in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to act on. We’ll see how the first one lands and go from there.

And then there is the other thing.

I would like to report that Isolated is out in the world and Bella Bruce’s author page is live and everything is proceeding beautifully on the hockey romance front. I would very much like to report that. Unfortunately what I am actually reporting is that Amazon has decided to be an absolute bitch about the whole thing and is currently sitting on both the book approval and the author page like a very bureaucratic dragon on a very unhelpful pile of gold.

I don’t have details beyond that. There are no details beyond that. There is just the waiting and the refreshing and the particular helpless frustration of having done everything right and then handed the whole thing to a platform that operates on its own timeline and its own logic and does not particularly care about your release schedule or your nerves or the fifteen years you have been carrying these characters around in your heart.

Bella is stalled. Her boys are waiting. There is nothing to do about it right now except wait.

So I am doing what writers do when one door slams shut on them: I am wandering through the other rooms. There are other projects. There are always other projects when you have three pen names and approximately a hundred books in various states of completion, and right now that particular abundance is genuinely a comfort. Something is always moving forward even when something else is stuck.

It is not the forward motion I wanted today.

But it is forward motion, and I am choosing to count it. Amazon will sort itself out. Or it won’t and I’ll have to go a few rounds with it, which is a battle I will fight when I get there. For now — other projects, more tea, a colouring book taking shape on the table, and a cross stitch box waiting for its moment.

And the cats, who are blissfully unbothered by publishing platforms and have, as ever, the right idea.

🖤 🏒

The Night Before

Today was slow in the way that days are slow when your brain is running at approximately four hundred kilometres an hour underneath the surface of everything. Outwardly: not much. Inwardly: a complete disaster, but a functional one.

I cannot decide if I am proud or terrified. Both, I think. Mostly both, simultaneously, with no clear winner.

Here is the thing that is sitting with me tonight. I come from fanfic. A long history in fanfic, years of it, and if you know that world then you know exactly what I mean when I say that fanfic readers are ruthless. Not all of them, and not without reason — they care deeply and they know their subjects and they will find the thing you got wrong at two in the morning on a Tuesday and they will have feelings about it in the comments. I have been on the receiving end of that particular flavour of feedback and it leaves a mark.

And now I am putting original work into a world that contains those same readers, and every instinct I have developed over years of that experience is quietly losing its mind.

I have been juggling these boys in words since 2018. I have done everything I can short of actually living their lives for them. I have researched and rewritten and edited and refined and had the whole thing pulled apart and put back together, and I still lie awake wondering if there is something I’ve missed, something someone will find, something that will give anyone a reason to drop negativity on my babies.

I know, logically, that I cannot control that. I know it. The logic is right there, very clear, completely accessible, and absolutely no comfort whatsoever.

But. The websites are functional. Not perfect — I want to be transparent about the not perfect — but functional, which is considerably better than where we were forty-eight hours ago. The newsletter welcome chains for both currently publishing authors are finished and in place. The things that needed doing got done, even on a slow day, even while quietly freaking out.

Tomorrow it goes into the wild.

I’m going to stop chewing my nails now. Or try. We’ll see how that goes.

No Big Adventures Today

This morning looked promising. I want to be clear about that — I woke up with genuine optimism and a list and everything. The day had other ideas, as days around here tend to, and by the time I’d finished my first cup of tea the showers were already building on the horizon with that particular Tasmanian determination that means they’re not going anywhere in a hurry.

So. Inside day it is.

The Pusheen situation continues to develop in unexpected ways. Miss Hopalong, having apparently decided that possession is nine tenths of the law, has dug in with a commitment that I find frankly impressive. She has abandoned her spot by the fire — which, if you know cats, you will understand is not a sacrifice made lightly — purely to maintain territorial control of the Pusheen. Pretty is presumably circling. Hopalong is unmoved. The fire burns unoccupied. Some battles are worth the cost.

My plan for today was websites. Both of them, ideally, with enough momentum to make a meaningful dent in the approximately seventeen things that need doing before launch. What actually happened was that a small ginger braincell attached himself to my dominant arm with the quiet certainty of someone who has made a decision and will not be revisited on the matter, and so I adapted (because he was Mumu’s brother and he’s grieving), as one does, and spent the time performing the last edit run on Isolated instead.

Which means the hockey romance may be done sooner than expected. Which means breathing space before the marketing push on the military romance. Which is, genuinely, good news.

And yet. Marketing.

I knew writing was work. I have always known writing was work — I have the manuscripts and the late nights and the four-in-the-morning rewrites to prove it. What I did not fully appreciate, and what is becoming clearer to me with every passing day, is that the writing is actually the easy part. The writing is the part I know how to do. The marketing is a learning curve that appears, from where I’m standing, to extend well beyond the visible horizon in both directions.

There is also the small mystery of why one of my author blogs does not appear to be picking up subscribers the way the other one is. My sister’s theory is that hockey romance is simply the flavour of the month and that explains the discrepancy entirely, and she may well be right. But I have that nagging feeling, the one that sits just behind your sternum and won’t be argued with, that I am doing something wrong and I haven’t identified it yet. I’m not going to catastrophise about it. I’m just going to quietly suspect myself until I figure it out.

Tomorrow. Websites. Possibly.

🖤 🏒

The Day the Wheels Fell Off (And Hopalong Asked Nicely)

I had a plan for today. A proper, colour-coded, very-adult plan. Blog content, scheduled posts, maybe even a newsletter draft if I was feeling ambitious.

Reader, none of that happened.

Instead, I am writing to you from the middle of what I can only describe as domestic chaos theatre, surrounded by furniture that has migrated to the centre of every room like some kind of indoor Stonehenge, waiting for an electrician who — bless him, he’s busy, it’s not his fault — won’t be able to get back to us until next week. So here we all are. Me, the cats, the cousin, Jo, and approximately four hundred kilograms of displaced furniture, just… existing together in the middle of the floor.

Jo, for her part, would like to burn it all down and start again. This is not an exaggeration. Jo has a very particular relationship with order and tidiness, and what is currently happening to her living environment is the stuff of her personal nightmares. She is coping. Barely. With the energy of someone who is very pointedly not looking at the corner where three chairs and a bookshelf are having an impromptu meeting.

The internet has been up and down for two days. Seriously, more up and down action than a cheap hookers knickers at happy hour. Two days! I will not tell you what I have been calling my hardware situation in the privacy of my own head, but let’s just say it rhymes with “Turdy McTurd Pants” and leave it at that. The connection has been spottier than a chocoholic teenager’s face, which has been a particular adventure given that we have a houseguest electrician. I’ll be honest — I was bracing for the cousin to struggle with it. She has not. She is, in fact, handling the Great Internet Outage of this week with a cheerful resilience that I did not see coming and which I find both impressive and slightly annoying, given that I am over here refreshing my connection every four minutes like it owes me money.

So. Nothing scheduled is getting done today. And I’ve decided that’s fine. Sometimes the universe puts its foot down — or in this case, pulls all your furniture into the centre of the room — and you just have to work around it.

Which brings me to the actual highlight of this entire chaotic day, because every terrible day needs one.

Yesterday, I lit the fire, and Hopalong — my little spina bifida girl — claimed her spot in front of it in her pink fluffy bed and basked. That’s the only word for it. She basked in the warm orange glow like she was on a very small, very cosy holiday, and it was the best thing I saw all day.

This morning we woke late, which meant the whole household launched immediately into that particular brand of morning chaos — feeding everyone, sorting the animals, trying to impose some kind of order on a house that is currently doing its best impression of a furniture warehouse. I was moving through it all on autopilot when I walked past the fireplace and stopped.

Hopalong was there. Quietly, politely, pawing at the glass door.

Just asking. Just wondering if perhaps today she might have her warm orange sunshine back again.

I lit the fire.

Obviously I lit the fire.

Jo could not even be annoyed about the delay to the morning schedule. Some things transcend OCD.

So that’s where I am today. Off-schedule, slightly frantic, very much typing this to clear my head rather than hit any kind of content goal. Some days are just like this — the house has its own agenda and your job is mostly to get out of the way and try not to make eye contact with Jo while she contemplates arson.

Normal transmission will resume. Probably once the electrician comes and the furniture goes back where it belongs and the internet stops performing its impression of a very indecisive yo-yo.

Until then, I have a fire, I have a cat who knows exactly what she wants and asks for it with the quiet dignity of someone who has earned it, and honestly? That’s enough.

In Which It Rains And I Have Ideas I’m Not Allowed To Start Yet

It rained today. Properly, committedly, Tasmanian-winter-is-coming rained. Which did not stop us loading ourselves into the car and heading to the Westbury markets, because reconnaissance waits for no weather system and the book van isn’t going to scout its own prospects.

The verdict: disappointing, with an asterisk.

Westbury is lovely. The drive is lovely. The idea of the markets is lovely. The reality was somewhat thin on the ground — not a great deal on offer in terms of what we were hoping to find — but the more surprising discovery was the payment situation. Or rather, the lack of one. A remarkable number of stall holders were cash only, which in the year we are currently living in is a choice that I find genuinely baffling. The book van will absolutely have electronic payment because I would like to actually sell books to people who, like most humans in 2025, do not routinely carry cash. Filed under: lessons learned before we’ve even started.

Came home damp and slightly deflated, spent the rest of the day making graphics for social media because apparently that is just my life now. The three universes require a frankly unreasonable amount of visual content and I am the person who has to create it. Future Suzy will be grateful. Present Suzy’s eyes are doing that thing they do after too many hours of screen time.

Watched a few more episodes of Off Campus in the evening. My verdict remains: it’s fine. It’s perfectly okay television. The thing that is keeping me watching is the hockey, and the hockey alone, because I am a died in the wool hockey person and we support the hockey in whatever form it presents itself. This is not negotiable. This is doctrine. The show could be considerably more compelling than it is and I would still be there for the ice time, and I will say no more on that subject except that Heated Rivalry remains undefeated in my personal rankings.

And then — because my brain apparently decided that what today needed was one more thing — I had a realisation about the Compass Point universe.

The origin series. How they got to be the soldiers they are before I got my hands on them and broke them. Except here is the thing: it already exists. All of it. Two hundred and seventy thousand words of it, sitting there, fully written, because that was the original form of Compass Point. The babies. The fledgling soldiers. The version of these men and women that existed before everything that comes after happened to them.

I wrote it. And then I made a decision.

I decided that writing broken ex-soldiers trying to rebuild their lives was more enriching than writing soldiers I was in the process of breaking. The destination interested me more than the journey. So I pivoted, and Compass Point became what it is now, and the 270,000 words went into a drawer, metaphorically speaking, where they have been sitting ever since in the particular patient way that large manuscripts have when they know their time will come.

Their time will come.

Just — not yet. I have two novels releasing in thirty days, a book van to launch, and a renovation bearing down on me. The 270,000 words will keep. They’ve already waited this long.

The future will deal with it accordingly.

The future is already making a list. 🖤

I have three additional observations about Off Campus that I feel compelled to share.

First: the MMC has curls. Magnificent, abundant, absolutely delicious curls that even a granny-aged woman finds herself wanting to run her fingers through. Full credit where it’s due. Those curls are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the show’s watchability and they know it.

Second: the FMC has, and I say this as a purely aesthetic observation, probably the roundest, perkiest breasts I have ever seen on a television screen. They sit there. They jiggle politely. They are present in, and occasionally almost out of, whatever scanty top she happens to be wearing in any given scene. I respect the commitment.

Third, and this is the one that actually matters:

I’ve worked out the difference. The real one, underneath all the budget and chemistry conversations. The Heated Rivalry boys lived their characters. This lot act theirs. And that distinction — small in description, enormous in effect — is everything.

HR gave us great ugly tears. The kind that aren’t pretty, that come with awkward silences and people not knowing where to look and absolute, overwhelming, unperformed joy when the moment called for it. You felt it in your chest because they felt it in theirs.

Off Campus gives me dry cheeks in the crying scenes and vacancy behind the eyes in the happy ones.

The curls remain exceptional.

Enough said. 🏒🖤

In Which I Have Feelings About Hockey Shows

I watched the first episode of Off Campus last night.

Before I say anything else, let me be clear about something: I idolise Elle Kennedy. Have done since I read the Out of Uniform series, which is when I understood exactly what she was capable of, and from that moment I have made grabby hands at everything she’s written. The woman is a giant of this genre and I say that with complete sincerity and zero caveats.

Which is precisely why I want to like the show. I really do. The cast is lovely — every single one of them — and the people in their orbit are well played and I have no complaints about the performances on an individual level.

But.

You heard that coming, didn’t you.

Here’s the thing. When Heated Rivalry wrapped its first season, some intrepid reporter announced that Off Campus was on its way as a replacement. A successor. The next hockey show to fill that particular gap.

No. I’m sorry. It really isn’t. And not just for the obvious gay-versus-het reason, though that’s obviously significant. This is something else.

Heated Rivalry was shot on what I can only describe as the most heroic shoestring budget in recent television history. Two cameras. Two complete unknowns in the lead roles — we didn’t get a recognisable face until episode three. And those two? They had chemistry that sizzled on the screen even when they were supposed to hate each other. Especially when they were supposed to hate each other. That’s the thing about rivalry done right — the friction is the heat, and if you can feel that heat in the middle of open hostility then you’re in extraordinary hands.

Off Campus has a larger budget. More established names. Better resourced in every technical sense.

And the two leads had no chemistry for me. None that I could find, anyway. I kept waiting for it and it didn’t arrive. The character I found myself genuinely interested in was the FMC’s best friend, and one of the MMC’s teammates — which is a lovely sign for the future of the supporting cast and a slightly worrying sign for the central romance, which is, after all, the engine the whole thing runs on.

Here’s my possibly controversial take: the budget increase didn’t do Off Campus any favours. There’s something about a small production that has to rely entirely on performance and chemistry that can produce something extraordinary when it works. When it doesn’t have the money to dazzle you, it has to move you. Heated Rivalry moved me. Repeatedly. While being shot in what appeared to be three locations and a car park.

I’m giving Off Campus a proper shot because it’s hockey and because Elle Kennedy’s source material deserves that much from me at minimum. The books are wonderful — Garrett Graham has been making readers weak in the knees for years and rightly so — and I live in hope that the chemistry finds its feet as the season settles in.

But I know which is the better hockey show for me this year, and it’s not a close contest.

Come back, Heated Rivalry. All is forgiven. You were irreplaceable and the replacement proves it. 🏒

In Which I Murder Two Mice in a Single Week (and Other Tales from the Editing Trenches)

I have killed two mice this week.

Not the furry kind — although given that I live in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats, that particular tally is considerably higher and I accept no responsibility for it. I mean the small plastic kind. The kind with the little scroll wheel that is, as it turns out, not built to survive the editing habits of a romance novelist in the middle of a manuscript crisis.

The scroll wheel went first. Then the clicks became increasingly non-committal, the kind of performance where the mouse would technically register the click but in a way that suggested it was doing so under duress. And then, on mouse number two, I watched the scroll wheel spin freely and uselessly like a tiny hamster wheel that had seen things it could not unsee, and I knew it was over.

Two mice. One week.

In my defence, I have been editing.

Not in a pleasant, let’s-refine-the-prose kind of way. I mean deep-trench, where-did-that-paragraph-go, I-know-I-wrote-this-scene-but-I-cannot-locate-it-in-any-of-the-seventeen-iterations-of-this-document kind of editing. Some of my current manuscripts are on their fifth or sixth pass. What that means in practice is that I have taken scenes out and put them back in. I have moved chapters around like furniture in a room I’m never satisfied with. I have cut a beautiful paragraph because it slowed the pacing, grieved it, come back three days later and pasted it into a different chapter, realised it didn’t work there either, and the paragraph now lives in a document called good_bits_dont_delete.docx along with seventy-three other orphans.

The scroll wheel is the victim of all this frantic up-and-down-the-document activity. The endless hunting. The it was here a minute ago. The scrolling up to check a character’s eye colour because I’ve used three different shades across six drafts and I cannot be trusted with continuity.

Here is what nobody tells you about being deep in multiple series simultaneously: the books start to blur. Not in terms of characters — I know my characters the way I know my cats, which is to say completely and with great fondness and an awareness of exactly which ones will cause problems — but in terms of where things are. Which version has the scene. Which draft kept the subplot. Whether that line of dialogue was cut for length or moved to a later chapter or exists only in the document called backup_backup_REAL_backup_FINAL.docx.

The mice are paying the price for this structural chaos.

I have ordered replacements. Possibly two, on the theory that I might as well accept who I am as a person and an editor and plan accordingly. I am also looking, somewhat desperately, into better document management — because while I love the chaos of a novel in progress, the chaos of losing a novel inside itself is a different and less romantic experience.

If you’re a fellow writer who has also achieved the impressive feat of scrolling a mouse into an early grave, I would love to know I’m not alone. And if you have a genuinely foolproof system for tracking what you’ve moved, cut, or buried alive in a miscellaneous document — please, for the sake of the mice, tell me about it in the comments.

The cats, at least, are fine. Thriving, even. Possibly because they do not edit.

Suzy is a romance novelist writing as Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, and KS Buckley. She lives in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats and an increasingly unreasonable number of half-finished manuscripts. She also runs Of Fables and Fantasies, a wandering mobile bookshop.

The Homeless Plot Bunny

I have a problem.

Not a serious problem. Not even an unusual problem, if you know writers. But a problem nonetheless.

I have a plot bunny and nowhere to put it.

It arrived the way they always do — uninvited, poorly timed, and entirely too comfortable making itself at home in the back of my head. It’s a cowboy series. Historical, probably. Maybe fantasy. Possibly both, because apparently I have no instinct for simplicity. The details are still fuzzy and the world is still mostly smoke and suggestion, but the feeling of it is there, which is usually how these things start.

And here’s the thing about cowboys.

They’re a little bit magic already, aren’t they? Before you add a single supernatural element, before you build a world or a magic system or decide what lives in the dark beyond the firelight — there’s already something about them. Those impossibly narrow hips. The broad shoulders. Just enough stubble to read as rugged rather than untidy. The particular way a man looks when he’s capable and quiet and not particularly interested in proving either. Cowboys occupy a very specific space in the imagination and they have done since I was a child watching westerns and feeling something I couldn’t yet name.

I’ve wanted to write them for years. You may remember I mentioned this.

The problem is that none of my four authors are immediately putting their hand up.

Bella took one look and went back to her hockey rink. She’s not wrong — her universe is full and loud and has very specific energy, and cowboys don’t quite fit the frequency. I respect the boundary even if I’m slightly annoyed by it.

Avery is considering. There’s an argument to be made — your protective soldier and your weathered cowboy are not, at their core, entirely different creatures. Both capable. Both carrying something. Both with that particular brand of quiet competence that I find endlessly compelling to write. Avery’s thinking about it. She hasn’t said no.

But if the magic comes — and I think it wants to come, I think that’s part of what the bunny is asking for — then it might really belong to Tara. Tara’s whole world runs on the old magic, the wild magic, the kind that lives in landscape and bloodline and the spaces between things. And there’s something about the American West, about that particular quality of vast and merciless and beautiful, that feels like it could hold that kind of magic very naturally.

So for now the cowboys are living in the hallway. Waiting to find out whose door they belong behind.

I’ll let you know when someone claims them.