hockey – 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.

Research. It’s Called Research.

Well. We’re going to Canada.

November 30th to December 8th, if you want the specifics, and I can tell you exactly what we’ll be doing with that time: watching the Washington Capitals play three games. Edmonton. Calgary. Vancouver. In that order. In December. In Canada.

Now, before anyone says anything, I want to be very clear about something.

This is research.

I am a working author. I write hockey romance under the Bella Bruce name — an entire fictional league, the Portland Pioneers, a whole universe of men who are enormous and emotionally constipated and skate very fast. You cannot write that convincingly from a stationhouse in rural Tasmania on the strength of YouTube highlights and vibes alone. At some point, a serious professional has to go and stand in the building. Feel the cold come off the ice. Hear what twenty thousand people sound like when the puck goes in. Learn what the air smells like at a rink in an actual hockey country in actual winter.

That’s not a holiday. That’s fieldwork. I’ll be taking notes. There will be notes.

(Jo has been very supportive about the notes. Jo has also been laughing at me for approximately three weeks. Both things can be true.)

Why now

Because Ovi re-signed.

For those of you who don’t follow hockey and are only here for the cats and the kitchen renovation: Alex Ovechkin is the Washington Capitals’ captain, the greatest goal scorer the sport has ever produced, and — at the time of writing — a man of forty who has just put pen to paper for a twenty-second season with the only club he’s ever played for. He’d left it late. There was a genuine possibility he’d simply walk away, and honestly, nobody would have blamed him.

He didn’t. He signed. “I’m back!” he said, which is exactly the correct number of words.

And the moment that news landed, we looked at each other and said: right. Now. It’s now or it’s never. Because the thing about watching a legend play out the last of it is that there’s no schedule for when the last of it arrives. You don’t get a warning. You get one more year, maybe, and then one day you’re reading a retirement announcement and thinking I always meant to go.

I have too many of those already. I wasn’t collecting another one.

The plan

Three games, three cities, nine days, and a schedule that is — I’ll be honest with you — mildly deranged. The Caps are on a long western road swing through that stretch, and we’ve essentially chosen to become barnacles on the hull of it. Edmonton, then Calgary, then Vancouver on the 7th, and then home.

Now about Snow…

And now I have to tell you something a little embarrassing, which is that neither of us has ever seen snow.

I mean properly seen it. Seen it falling and staying. Seen it sitting on things — on a fence post, on a car roof, on a branch — being snow, in the way it does in every Christmas film ever made.

We’ve seen the miniscule flurries you get here occasionally, the kind that come down looking very promising and then vanish the instant the sun clears the hill, like they’ve remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. And I once saw snow in Oregon, in spring, which I’d been quite excited about until I got close enough to establish that it was really more ice than snow — a sort of grey, granular, week-old business that had clearly given up on being beautiful some time ago.

That’s it. That’s the whole of my snow experience. Forty-odd years on this earth and I have never once stood in falling snow.

So somewhere in Edmonton or Calgary — and everyone assures me it’s a fairly safe bet in December — there is a very strong chance that two grown Tasmanian women are going to stop dead in the middle of a footpath, in the way of everybody, and simply stare upward with their mouths open like a pair of absolute tourists.

I’m not going to apologise for it. I’ve been waiting a long time. If you’re Canadian and you see us doing it, please just go around.

I am also told that Edmonton in early December is not cold in the way that we understand cold. Tasmanian cold is a damp, complaining sort of cold that gets into your knees. Edmonton cold, from what I gather, is a cold with opinions. A cold that takes an interest in you personally. We’re buying proper coats — real ones, not the optimistic Tasmanian approximation of a winter coat — and this has been budgeted for. It’s a business expense, obviously, because it’s research.

And the history

Because it can’t only be hockey — even I have limits, and Jo has conditions — we’re building the rest of the trip around actually seeing where we are. Museums. Old buildings. The bits of a country that tell you how it got to be the way it is. I’m the woman who once climbed a hill in New Zealand to stand where a film set used to be, so you already know I’m not going to be in Alberta and not go looking for what’s underneath it.

There’ll be a fair bit of that. There’ll be photographs. Given my track record with a certain tour group and twelve thousand photos of a fictional village, you should probably brace yourselves.

The honest bit

Here’s the truth of it, under all the joking about research.

I’ve been writing about this sport for years. I’ve built a league, filled it with players, given them lines and rivalries and terrible haircuts and love stories. And in all that time I’ve never once sat in a rink in the country that invented the thing and watched it happen in front of me.

That’s a gap. Not a fatal one — you can write around a gap — but I’ve always known it was there, sitting in the back of my head every time I described the sound of a body hitting the boards and had to imagine it.

So yes, it’s research. It’s genuinely research. It’s also nine days with my favourite person, in a country neither of us has seen, watching a forty-year-old Russian do the thing he’s better at than anyone who has ever lived, while there’s still time to watch him do it.

And somewhere in the middle of it, if the weather is kind — and by kind I mean appropriately unkind — I’m going to stand outside in a proper coat and watch snow come down and settle on things, for the first time in my life, at the age of far-too-old-to-be-this-excited.

Some research you have to go and get in person.

See you in December. I’ll bring back notes. And photos. So many photos.

— Suzy

In Which The House Wins Again And Hockey Lets Me Down (But I Have A Plan)

Luke is having a day off. This is not because Luke has had enough — Luke is a professional and professionals do not have enough — but because the house has been so comprehensively unpleasant about its lathe and plaster shenanigans that a strategic retreat became necessary before he exhausted his entire vocabulary of swear words and had nothing left for future jobs.

Yesterday, in addition to the walls defeating him at every turn, we also had no internet. Not in a dramatic way. In the specific, vindictive way that old houses and earnest electricians can produce between them — a quiet, total absence of connectivity that arrived without announcement and declined to leave until it was good and ready. We responded the only way available: hotspotting determinedly from our phones, in the crouched-over-a-device posture of people who will not be beaten by their own infrastructure.

The house is winning. I respect the commitment even as I resent it.

Now. Hockey.

I am a hockey girl to my bones. This is not seasonal, not occasional — it is a fundamental character trait that predates most of my other personality features. Every year, even when my team isn’t in the running, I can find something to attach to in the playoffs. A goalie. A story. A team doing something unexpected. I am not a difficult hockey fan to satisfy.

This year has vexed me.

The good news: no Florida teams. I am taking this as a personal gift from the hockey gods.

The bad news: Vegas. Again. Has Vegas missed a playoffs since they started? I cannot be bothered to look it up because it doesn’t feel like they have, and confirming it will only make me more annoyed than I already am. Every other expansion team has had their years of being authentically terrible at hockey in the way of new teams finding their feet. Vegas just turned up and started performing and the rest of us have been processing this injustice ever since.

Last year I had Bob. Sergei Bobrovsky, for those not fluent in goalie nickname. All hockey girls have a soft spot for goalies — this is not a choice, it is simply how we are wired. Bob gave me something last year. This year I cannot even go there.

The best I can do — quietly, and I will deny it if directly confronted — is hope the Habs win. Don’t tell anyone. They are Canadian, and Canadian is the bar I am working with this year, and I am not too proud to work with it.

Hockey is dead to me this year.

That said.

I have also just joined the AIHL viewing network. The Australian Ice Hockey League runs in a completely different season to the NHL — which means that rather than having hockey from October to May and then staring into the void for the remaining months, I now have the theoretical capacity for hockey twelve months of the year. This is either the most sensible thing I have done recently or a harbinger of something my optometrist is going to have opinions about.

Either way: hockey. Always hockey. The big boys can vex me all they like. I have contingencies. 🏒🖤

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. 🏒