The Strangest Email I Said Yes To: Turns Out I’m a Hockey Romance Novel Editor Now (Part 1)

Over the course of the season, I traded dozens of emails with a romance author to help fact check her debut hockey novel

On September 17, 2024, I got a cold outreach email to the stephen@ account here at 100 Degree Hockey with the subject line: “Questions about Austin hockey for a hockey romance”. At 100 Degree Hockey, we’re all about promoting the great game of hockey in whatever format that may take. Our internal mission statement says, “We strive to tell the story beyond the box score and drive a deeper understanding of the great sport of hockey and the people who make it possible.”

So when Debbie Charles, someone I did not know of at all but who lives in the Austin area and had previously written a number of successful historical romance novels, reached out asking for help, I was in. You may have heard that hockey as a romance subgenre is a booming market, and I had read several articles to that effect. I was interested enough to reply.

Over the course of the ensuing seven months, Debbie and I would correspond over email on questions and problems she was facing with the hockey side of the story. We corresponded about everything from language choices and contract details down to the specifics of how and when players get paid.

On April 16, “Dances with Pucks” was published on Amazon. It is the first in Debbie’s “Texas Tornadoes” series; she is already writing the second book. Last week, I was able to conduct an extended interview with Debbie about how she came to the hockey genre, the process of writing the book, how she came up with the Austin-based team, her expectations vs. reality and the difficulty of writing narratives within a believable framework of established sport.

We’re going to drop the interview in two parts.

If you comment on this article or the followup tomorrow, you will be entered to win a free copy of the book. I will select the winner by random number drawing on Friday at puck drop for Game 3. Winners will be notified with a reply to their comment.

Stephen Meserve: You've written romance novels before, but you were previously in the historical romance genre. Why hockey for the next series?

Debbie Charles: A few reasons. I've read a lot of hockey romance for over a decade now. In the past year and a half, it's become much more popular and a much bigger segment of the romance market. And so there was a part of me that felt like historical romance is a much smaller subset of the romance market and it may or may not be getting even smaller. And so the business person in me wanted to be more part of a growth market. But it's also a sport that I know and I like (or I thought I knew until I started writing nuances of a hockey game as though I had to narrate them or be a commentator for them).

I think part of the appeal for me with hockey romance is that unlike the NFL where their players get so much bad press and and I have to assume some of that is well-deserved for being players off the field as well as on. Hockey doesn't have that. For the romance readers, hockey feels a little bit more attainable. The suspension of disbelief is jumpable, so it appealed to me as a reader. I have a friend who's very much into hockey and she encouraged me because she's also a romance reader. With her help, I started.

Stephen Meserve: Well, that leads perfectly into the next question. You have a friend who's encouraging you. You like hockey, but you're obviously not a hockey expert. This leads into how we got connected.

Debbie Charles: Right. She and her husband were inaugural season ticket holders with the Texas Stars when they came to Cedar Park. They are from Chicago, so they have a long hockey-loving history. She, in fact, along with you are in the dedication of my first book, Dances with Pucks. 

She was telling me about resources that help educate people in an understandable way. They break down the game or they break down the pros and cons of, let's say, an AHL team going to the Calder Cup versus having their stars called up and taken to the NHL affiliate for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

She referenced your book, We Win Here, and your site, 100 Degree Hockey. And me being the shy retiring flower that I am, I just said, "Okay, let me just cold call him via email." So I emailed you and I asked you, can I send you batches of questions here and there about nuances of hockey that I didn't know and even a web search wouldn't get me the actual details. It's been lovely to pick your brain. I just need enough to make it understandable to a non-hockey or even a hockey fan.

Debbie's kind words
in the Acknowledgements.

Stephen Meserve: For my part, it was an immediate yes. I thought that it was going to be fascinating. I told everyone that I interacted with that week about that email and the out-of-the-blue nature of it and how much fun I expected it to be. It was fun both in getting a chance to work with you and discuss some of the finer points but also just getting to be involved in the creative process. When you're reading a book, if you know something about a topic and something is wrong, it takes you out of the action. That brings me to the next question. As you were thinking about embarking on a hockey novel, what were those things that you were most worried about getting wrong? 

Debbie Charles: Well, I'll tell you what I wasn't worried about first because I still find it hilarious. When someone is taking the puck down the ice alone, I would have called that dribbling because I learned basketball before I learned hockey. I had no idea what I didn't know. That's my perfect example of needing correction even after I've asked all the questions I could think to ask. You've been a fantastic editor as well as an expert resource and I love that. Thank you.

In the novella that I wrote that is a newsletter exclusive, that was an international player. I knew nothing about how they would come to a team, if the agents are the same, if the draft is the same, that kind of thing. That was a big one. I'm still learning. I still watch and even more than watching the games, I listen to the recaps. The way they describe it and some of the nomenclature that is particular to hockey. There are certain ways you phrase things. 

Stephen Meserve: You'd watched hockey before. You obviously got to know it as a fan. In writing about it, how did your understanding of the sport and the culture behind the sport change as you went through the writing process?

Debbie Charles: It definitely changed. I think those are two questions to me. 

Because I write dual POV where I'm writing as both the female main character and the male main character. When I'm in the male POV, I not only have to think like a guy to some extent, or at least like a woman that wants to read what a guy is thinking, but I also then have to think about him actually being in the action of playing hockey. So that's one layer, right? 

What happens in the locker room? What happens in practice? What does the schedule look like? You were kind enough to send me example schedules. Those were invaluable in terms of getting the male main character right.

The culture of it is a whole other thing. My friends keep sending me articles. There were a couple articles recently. One was in [The Athletic] about a hockey hair award every year

Stephen Meserve: Yep. The Minnesota All-Hockey Hair Team. 

Debbie Charles: Yes, that’s right. There was another too about the culture changing for players where they're not going out and partying as much and they're turning more to CBD and gummies because they not only help them relax and sleep, but also the article said it has some muscle relaxation aspects to it. They're becoming more healthy. They're not eating junk food. They're not drinking a ton of beer. They're out there eating healthy food and getting a lot of sleep. And it's just a very different culture.

I’m reading these and thinking how I can incorporate them into this book. Because every hockey romance I've read has their favorite aftergame bar and they all go there and some of the guys party hard and some of them don't. But it's hard for me to picture a professional athlete drinking his face off after a game when he knows he has to practice the next morning.

Stephen Meserve: There are photos and stories of guys smoking cigarettes in between the periods back in the day. Sergei Zubov, who played for Dallas, would have a cigarette in between periods. You just can't imagine a cigarette coming anywhere near a professional hockey player nowadays. I'm sure some of them do smoke sometimes, but it's very much a business and their body is the way they make money and so they treat it in a much different way. 

So, there were questions you asked me at the beginning where I tried to give you a lot of ‘outs’ so if you want something like this to happen, then here's three different ways that it could potentially go down if this is an important plot point. Were there scenes, plot points or important elements of the story that you had to change after you learned more about something in hockey, how things work behind the scenes or whether something would be likely or unlikely to happen?

Debbie Charles: I don't know about past tense, but I will say one thing I'm looking at now is the arena. For instance, the Texas Stars are in the playoffs and there's this weird gap between games one and two. It's partly because of the availability of the arenas that they play in. And I know NHL arenas might be different, but I don't know how different. 

In the inaugural year because my team is an Austin-based NHL team and it's an expansion team, so it's their first year and I use the excuse of the billionaire owners, they don't have it be multi-use, especially because Austin doesn't have an NBA team. I'm going to take the inaugural year and hope that people are okay with suspending disbelief, but I need to start thinking about that for the future.

Stephen Meserve: I realize now as we're fifteen minutes in here, we haven't given the pitch for the book yet. So, give us the book jacket. You've got a new team here in Austin. You've got a shared POV alternating between chapters. What is “Dances with Pucks”?

Debbie Charles: It's an NHL goalie whose mom died when he was just finishing high school. One of their shared loves was to watch “Dancing with the Stars” together. So he took up ballroom dancing and he uses that to keep fit and flexible in the off season. He moves to Austin early, and he wants to find a dance instructor for private lessons. He does, and they start to be attracted to each other only to find out that she's actually one of the three owners of the team.

She, her sister and her brother own the team, and her brother is taking the lead on it. It’s his pet project. So now he's interested in not only his dance instructor but his boss's boss's boss. And so it's a workplace romance, and it's a secret romance because of that. And then there's a few other things. He wants kids; she doesn't think she can have kids.

Tomorrow we'll chat more about how Debbie created the Texas Tornadoes and how she sees the entire Austin hockey universe building a connected story for her readers in addition to a discussion of BookTok.