Tag: fiction

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 Yesterday Was A Lot, And Mumma Knows What She’s About

Yesterday was one of those days that gets quietly written off. Medical things happened — nothing dramatic, just the kind of thing that is efficient and necessary and still somehow uses up every bit of available energy by the time it’s done, leaving you with approximately enough fuel to sit on the couch and watch the fire and call it a victory. Which I did.

Life on the farm, of course, does not pause for energy deficits.

The guinea fowl remain numpties. This is a constant. I have stopped expecting improvement and have found a kind of peace in it. The geese are currently performing their Evil Overlord routine, which involves a great deal of purposeful waddling and meaningful staring and an overall air of barely contained menace. They’re not fooling anyone but they’re very committed to the bit.

And then there are the chickens.

My next door neighbour’s chickens — eight of them — have decided, apparently without consulting anyone, that they live here now. They have moved in with my menagerie and they will not go home and they cannot be reasoned with. My neighbour has assessed the situation, recognised a lost cause, and formally ceded ownership.

I now have eight more chickens.

I am not counting them. I know the number will bother me and I have made the executive decision not to know it. They’re here. There are some of them. That’s as far as I’m going.

In more soothing news: Mumma has moved on from the Pusheen bed, but let no one think for a moment that Mumma has given up on warmth. Mumma has simply upgraded. She has installed herself in the fluffy donut bed, directly beside the wood fire, and she is glowing. Not metaphorically — the firelight is literally on her face and she looks like a Renaissance painting of a cat who has made every correct decision.

The Pusheen sits nearby, empty, watching.

Mumma does not care. Mumma has the fire. 🖤

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.

The Four of Us

Let me explain something, because it’s probably overdue.

If you go looking for me on the internet — the writing me, not the fifteen-cats-and-a-rainy-view-of-the-Western-Tiers me — you will find not one author but four. Bella Bruce. Avery Beckett. Tara Benson Boyd. And KS Buckley, who I share with my best friend and writing soulmate Karen, because apparently one of everything was never going to be enough for either of us.

There are two reasons this happened, and I’ll be honest about both of them.

The first is that when I was going through university they hammered one particular rule into us with genuine conviction: one author cannot write in more than one genre. It confuses the reader, they said. It’s messy, they said. A brand is a promise, they said, in that way academics have of making marketing sound like philosophy. I absorbed this so thoroughly that even when I eventually threw most of what I learned about publishing out the window, I kept the pen names. Turns out they weren’t entirely wrong — each of my four writers does have a genuinely different voice and style, and keeping them as separate people works better than trying to shift gears inside the one identity. My brain seems to agree, even when the rest of me finds it absolutely exhausting.

The second reason is simpler and considerably more personal: there are parts of my family who would mock me mercilessly for writing romance. The smut, they’d call it, with that particular tone that means they think they’re being funny. I’d have had a pseudonym regardless of genre rules, just to keep the peace and my dignity intact. I simply didn’t anticipate that one pseudonym would quietly become four.

So: Bella Bruce writes sports romance — hockey, mostly, though her universe has expanded to include rockstar and movie star romance because apparently I have no restraint. Avery Beckett writes military romance with thriller tendencies. Tara Benson Boyd writes whimsical fae romantasy. And KS Buckley writes magical realism and detective noir — that one belongs to Karen and me together, in theory, though the distance between Portland and rural Tasmania is doing its level best to complicate things. We have the people. We have the story. We just need to nail down the magic system and the grit, and then we’ll be properly on our way.

There’s a funny thing about KS Buckley’s main characters, actually. Sharp-eyed readers of Avery’s books might notice something familiar about a pair called Marc and Finn. Those two are, in their own way, a version of KS’s world — the same essential people, living a different life. And if something about them seems oddly familiar beyond that, well. You might be thinking of a certain television show. Our plans for these characters never quite fitted the fanfic box, even when that’s where we started out. There’s no shame in fanfic — none whatsoever — but that is absolutely a tale for another day.

This is probably one of the last times I’ll lay all of that out here. This blog is not my writing life — it’s the brain dump that keeps me and the four authors living in my head from collectively losing the plot. You’ll hear about the writing on series launch days, because those make me nervous and excited in equal measure and I tend to spill over a bit. Otherwise, this is just me. Suzy. Clan of three humans, fifteen cats, an indeterminate number of chickens, and a view of the mountains when the weather allows.

The four of them can look after themselves.

I did a thing

I actually did the thing.

Almost Yours Again is listed on Amazon. As of tonight, it is a real book that real people can find, click on, and buy. I have been staring at the listing for the last twenty minutes like it might disappear if I look away.

I don’t entirely know how to feel about this. Proud? Terrified? Both at the same time in a way that is making my chest do something weird? Yes. All of that. Simultaneously.

Here’s the thing about writing for as long as I have — and I have been at this for a very long time, long enough that I’m not going to put the number in writing because it will make me feel ancient — you get comfortable living inside the work. The writing is yours. The characters are yours. The story happens in your head and on your screen and it belongs entirely to you, and that is a deeply comfortable place to be. Nobody can tell you it isn’t good enough when it’s still just a document on your hard drive.

Uploading it to Amazon tonight felt like opening my front door and shoving one of my cats out into the street and saying off you go then, make your own way in the world.

(For the record, none of my actual fifteen cats are going anywhere. They are all fine. This is a metaphor.)

The book is Avery Beckett’s — that’s the name on the cover — but the sleep I’m going to lose over it is entirely mine. Every writer who has ever hit publish knows this particular brand of stomach-drop. You spend all this time making something, and then you let it go, and then it’s just… out there. In the world. Without you.

What if nobody finds it?

What if somebody finds it and hates it?

What if somebody finds it and loves it and wants more, and then I have to actually deliver more? (Okay, that one I can handle. I have notes. I have so many notes.)

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. And tonight I did it. The book exists in the world in a way it didn’t exist this morning, and that is not nothing. That is actually something quite enormous.

And just in case that wasn’t enough chaos for one brain, I should mention that Avery Beckett is only one of three active pseudonyms currently taking up residence in my head. Three. Distinct. Voices. All with their own worlds, their own characters, their own very strong opinions about where their stories are going. You might think that sounds confusing. You could possibly be right.

What this means in practice is that the Avery universe alone currently runs to forty books. Forty. The first ten are written, edited, and ready to go — which means I have somehow committed to one book a month for the next ten months. I’m genuinely unsure whether that’s impressive or certifiable. Possibly both. Probably both.

So. Almost Yours Again is out there now, finding its feet, looking for its people. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea going cold beside me and a publishing schedule that would make a sensible person lie down in a dark room. Proud and terrified in equal measure.

Mostly proud.

If you happen to find the book out there in the wild—thank you. For looking. For clicking. For even considering it. That matters more than I can quite put into words yet.

The cats love me unconditionally and ask no questions about release schedules. This is very important right now.

Ask me again in the morning.