You Can’t Convince Me a Hockey Stick Isn’t a Weapon

Me: I kind of want to make one of my characters a hockey player.
Rick: (thoughtful silence) So then it’s research?
Me: (laughing) See? You get me. I think I’m just not comfortable having an aspect of my life that’s not somehow connected to work…

The thing is, I’ve accidentally become an ice hockey fan. A ridiculous fact we will pass right over to focus on the fact that I’m now writing a book about sport. Well, not about sport. A book with sport in it. It’s not actually hockey, though. It’s a made up sport. With magic. That totally makes it better. Or possibly worse. I can’t decide. There may be something wrong with me. Okay, okay, we all know there are a number of things wrong with me. This is probably just… another thing that’s weird with me.

It’s not as bad as it sounds, anyway. It’s not like you’ll need to understand how the game works to read it. (Which is good because right now I don’t know how it works.) The kids in the book just play my entirely fictional sport. Because one of them desperately needs something that they’re really good at. Something they’ve always been good at. It’s fundamental to their character. And I could have made them super smart or great at knitting or geese juggling. But no. They play sport.

And yeah, it’s weird. My main character’s a jock, are not words I ever thought I’d say. But in reality it’s not all that far outside my sphere of experience. There’s a reason hockey’s always been my favourite of the sports I never paid attention to. It’s because there was a time, back in primary school, when my teacher stood my bloodthirsty child self on a muddy field* and handed me a weapon and I said, Yessss…

* I gotta say, as a ten-year-old one of the great appeals of hockey was that it was basically played in the mud. Skidding through puddles and trying to see just how dirty you could get yourself and your teammates while attempting to knee-cap the other team… Ah, fond memories.