A.L. Heard

I think it’s well established that I like hockey and love writing mm hockey romance stories. With “Drop The Gloves” coming out in a few months, I thought it’d be fun to talk about what draws me to this genre of romance and comparing the hockey novels I’ve written in terms of their tropes.

Spoiler warning: I talk about the tropes in Hockey Bois, The Trade Deadline, and Drop the Gloves. Some of these comparisons might reference very general but also very specific pieces of the books, so be aware!

I’m not even going to talk (much) about why I love hockey lol – it’s a physically intense sport that still requires an immense amount of skill, it’s fast-paced, it’s technical, it’s just *chef’s kiss*. When I wrote Hockey Bois, all I knew was that I wanted to write a romance novel and that I liked hockey, so I combined the two. I legitimately didn’t know sports romance was a thing, and definitely didn’t know hockey romance was, either. It was just me writing about things I like, which I’ve kept going with the other books.

So first, let’s get that comparison up there…

My favorite hockey dynamic is teammates to lovers. There’s a lot to be said for rivals to lovers and a bunch of other pairings, but this is my all time favorite. It lets me do all the fun parts of forced proximity and secret romance with a dash of forbidden romance.

I also like writing idiots to lovers, people who are perfectly competent in other aspects of their lives but not so much with relationships. There’s a certain type of vulnerability in only being an idiot in love, and it gives me a chance to be playful and bring in other tropes that work better when the main characters aren’t thinking with their whole brain (just their whole heart).

Another thing I do consistently with romances: an epilogue. Just getting that glimpse into their future to double check that they’re still happy together, that they’ve gotten through (or are starting to get through) their issues and are on a path to Happily Ever After instead of just Happy For Now, is what I love to see in romance. It also gives the readers an idea that “hey, the on page story is over but they’re still out there living their lives” which is imho very satisfying.

And then you’ll notice… there’s a huge grab bag of other things thrown in – even though I’m writing mm hockey romance over and over, with the same core tropes, I don’t want to feel like I’m writing the same story over and over. I pull in other things that I like (social media, for example, or height difference). Sometimes there are things I’ll use again but with a different spin (Brady’s gay/bi panic moment is not the same as Evan’s gay panic, and the respective ‘one gets hurt, the other gets punchy’ moments in those books hit very different emotional beats).

Basically I’m pulling my fav things and mixing them with new ones so that both I as the writer and you as the reader get the fun of the same thing in a new way 🙂

Bonus: How I ended up with Vampires Don’t Play Hockey

My writing career started with fanfiction, and though I wouldn’t say it was my forte, I’ve written some absurd things in fic. Who doesn’t like a good crack fic? It was kind of like that when I wrote Vampires Don’t Play Hockey. I wanted to combine some things I like that don’t seem to go together and have fun with it, because why not?

What are you favorite tropes to read? If you write, do you find you gravitate towards writing the some ones you enjoy reading?