However, she doesn’t feel like updating her word count until later that Saturday, where she thinks it will make for better content on air if she reveals both the word count and the resulting achievement badge. But until then, around the dinner table, Caro’s parents appear to have caught a glimpse of Player Masher.

“Mais pourquoi, chérie, tu ne joues pas à un pool de hockey?” (But why, honey, don’t you play fantasy hockey?) Caro’s mom asks her. “J’ai lu Player Masher et tu semblais connaître les réalités du hockey” (I read Player Masher, and you seemed familiar with the realities of hockey)

“Les pools de hockey avec lesquels je suis familière semblent, pour la plupart, mettre trop d’importance à l’offensive” (Fantasy hockey pools with which I’m familiar mostly seem to overemphasize offense) Caroline responds, in a solemn voice.

“Vaut mieux un roman à la glace de rose où le hockey est présent plutôt qu’absent!” (Better a hockey romance where hockey is present rather than absent!) her dad comments about Player Masher in its infancy.

“Pôpa, quand as-tu commencé à lire des romans à la glace de rose?” (When did you start reading hockey romance books?)

“Il y a quelques mois” (A few months ago)

Damn it… this entire Kraken BookTok scandal thrusted hockey romance into the limelight, and not just here where hockey fans are legion! I feel like Glitter will yell at me for this, later tonight, Caro starts eating apple pie with ice cream, along with her parents. At that point, they all stop talking about fantasy hockey and her manuscript.

Once the stream begins, she prepares her own NaNoWriMo page so that she’s ready to update her word count and show the sixth achievement badge being unlocked right at the beginning. She sees her own readership bolstered by both hockey fans and romance fans among the viewer base of her primary game that night:

“Welcome to tonight’s stream, and I announce that I am treating NaNoWriMo as a game in its own right this month. A little simplistic as a game perhaps, but today I made significant progress on Player Masher!” Caro then brings up her home page, where she is about to show the achievements she already unlocked.

And now that her word count is over 5,000, the audience sees a black hexagon badge with 5 white bars in it appear on her main page.

“And I announce that I plan on 100%ing NaNoWriMo this year, and a surprise will await you if I succeed!” Caroline sees another user enter the stream, about whom she doesn’t suspect a thing yet.

???: Caro, it seems like you tied your book too intensely to the current season…

Lagado: What do you mean?

???: Caro had her male lead claimed off waivers by Montreal in her book because Reinbacher was out!

Sampoong enters her voice chat around this time. “There was only, like, one hockey romance book I ever read that even gave an on-ice reason to trade for someone or, in your case, claim Gustavs off waivers!”

“You would think that, while hockey players do get injured, some teams would trade for, or claim off waivers, a player at the injured player’s position! Especially when whether the injured player will be able to play at all for a given season is in doubt!” Caro defends herself.

Capitolium enters the voice chat. “Also, Sampoong, no one could possibly read all hockey romance books in existence! That said, Caro is right”

???: It’s normal for some D-man to be claimed off waivers because the claimant has injured D-men, just don’t name a real player!

“But I want Gustavs to be traded away when that player he replaced up until the trade deadline is healthy!”

Glitter’s turn to intervene arrives, with her blood pressure through the roof. “Caro, this just doesn’t feel like a hockey romance anymore! You’re far too preoccupied with the hockey plotline!”

“My plan was that Gustavs improves his game in Montreal, and fetches a pretty big haul from a playoff team with holes on defense! I even want some tensions to arise over his perceived trade value!”

Sure, Caro can base a character on Reinbacher, but she shouldn’t refer specifically to him! The mystery viewer starts thinking of what other changes she ought to make to the teams in Player Masher.

Chelymun: Caro, you’re putting the plow before the oxen!

Lagado: Do you mean putting the cart before the horse?

“What do you mean, I am putting the plow before the oxen?” Caro feels her own blood pressure skyrocket. “Sometimes you have ideas for the later stages of the book before you actually get there!”

I may as well start playing the damned TRPG! Caro sighs as she checks on the battle pass quest of the day. But once she puts in the in-game work for the day, she resumes writing the book. A passage where the MMC gets an opportunity to bond with his new teammates in Montreal.

“You mentioned that you wanted tension to arise because of perceived trade value. But don’t you feel like players’ love interests have more to worry about in trades than what they’re going for? You only need to read about Chris Pronger’s wife when Pronger was an Oiler to know what WAGs really value when players face the prospect of a trade while in a relationship!” Sampoong scolds her.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Oh, that would be tension not on the level of Emma, but for the front office and the not-Canadiens’ fan base!” Caro defends herself while she looks for what caused him to get traded to the Ducks.

Drat! If I am to keep teams in both Montreal and Seattle, I still need to portray Montreal as a hockey-crazy city! Regardless of where I would place the training facility, or the arena! Caro starts sweating while thinking about what she might be able to keep and what she must change in her book about her team. After reading about Lauren Pronger’s time in Edmonton.

???: A lot of hockey romance writers either place their teams in a city that doesn’t have one or keep their cities but change the names on both the team and the people in it

At this point, I might compare Caro to Victoria Denault, who’s one of the hockey romance writers heaviest on the hockey I read, the mystery viewer ruminates on his past reading experiences. Canadian hockey romance writers tended to get the hockey best; I have yet to read hockey romance books as written by European authors, though. And Caro portrayed Latvia as a hockey-crazy country! If Latvians are as hockey-obsessed as Québécois are, I have good hopes that some Latvian-written hockey romance book would get the hockey better! Outside of, like, Denault or even Caro.

“Sorry, Caro, but you must change the names of teams and players involved! Do you have ideas for alternate team names?” Capitolium asks Caroline while she is focused on writing a scene with some players inviting him to eat together.

And then Caro ends up writing about his teammates buying Gustavs poutine for him to eat somewhere in Dix30, since he apparently never ate it in his previous trips to play Seattle away games in Montreal.

After the poutine ends, he goes to one of his teammates’ home, at which he temporarily lives while he looks for his own place to live around either Dix30 or near downtown Montréal. His teammate gives a hungry Gustavs more Québécois bébelles to eat, but sweets, such as maple toffee.

“Caro, even if you change the names of teams and players involved, I’m not sure how that is going to ensure that the book will not exceed a certain amount of hockey content!” Glitter keeps screaming at the streamer.

“Glitter, if you find my own project too heavy on the hockey, this is what you can do for the next few weeks: you stay tuned and watch me play this online TRPG, and leave the stream immediately after I finish what I’m doing for the day in-game!” Caro tells her angry viewer off. “That’s if you still want to watch me play the game, even after you made it clear the NaNo project soured you on me off it!”

She clearly knows what she’s doing in-game, and this is how I came to know that, behind the game, Caroline seemed to be a very intelligent person. She knew just as clearly about the transactional aspects of hockey. But it’s just her writing project that rubbed me the wrong way! Glitter ruminates before leaving the stream to read the unfinished hockey romance she paused to watch Caro run stuff such as the weekly gauntlet in infernal difficulty. Or watch other streamers play that game, and run different content.

“Way to tell Glitter off!” Capitolium then DMs Caro his current word count.

“I might be more willing to endure some hockey as a prelude to the spicier stuff” Sampoong comments on his own tastes, while he watches Caro write faster than usual.

And more specifically, a locker room scene after a practice, where Gustavs overhears his teammates talk about their WAGs. But the more words Caro writes about his teammates’ WAGs, and how it induces FOMO in him, the more the words of her viewers weigh heavily on her.

Ouch. Now I have a better idea of what it means to have to choose who to be criticized by, and what to be criticized for. However, better act now to remove all references to Canadiens or Kraken, or any people associated with either team. Luckily, I didn’t define who was the “C” team in my outline yet, nor where it is, but it mustn’t be a name of an actual team if it was to be a team in an actual NHL market, Caro weighs the implications of what that mystery viewer told her to do, with complete understanding of the legal trouble she could land herself in if she doesn’t act on that. But if I wanted him to be traded to “C” because “C” deemed him the most cap-effective piece to trade for, as a result of his play improving in Montreal, this means… wait a minute! I’m not yet at a point where Gustavs takes Emma to a game!

“What about the Constellations?” Caro floats the idea to her viewers.

“Which would replace which team’s name, Kraken or Canadiens?” Sampoong asks her.

She then fields suggestions from her viewers, knowing that both Seattle and Montreal are retained for the cities of what her outline called teams A and B. Admittedly she doesn’t know Seattle very well, beyond Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks and Microsoft. And the Kraken playing in the Climate Pledge Arena, whose name must be left out, according to some viewers, as is the Centre Bell.

Damn it! Everyone familiar with the Montreal Canadiens will know about how they play in Centre Bell, and hence it will become all too clear that I have no choice but to leave that out too! And this means I can’t be too precise about where exactly in the city the not-Canadiens’ arena is going to be! However, I think I can leave the practice facility somewhere in Brossard without specifying where in that suburb it is, Caro starts thinking about what that implies for the training facility, since there will be scenes in there going forward. But she reviews viewer-suggested names:

Maridun: Don’t forget that any name you could pick should ideally represent a trait of the city the team represents!

Chelymun: The biggest thing for the not-Habs is to ensure the name you pick for them should work in both English and French

And then it makes her life easier for Seattle’s team, in which case the whole Kraken scandal made her choice easier. Especially since the scandal’s catch phrase was Krack my Back. The Backcrackers. She simply replaces all instances of Kraken by Backcrackers in her manuscript. Of which there wasn’t that many.

I can always leave the Backcrackers’ paraphernalia a little vague but if I am going to use Constellations for Montreal, I need to have multiple stars in its logo. This mystery viewer forced my hand, and it’s not pretty at all! She then reads through the reactions of her viewers to Constellations as a possible candidate.

“Constellations? Did you think Montreal had any real association with astronomy?” Lagado enters voice chat for the first time in a while.

“It was the first thing that came to my mind that worked in both English and French; the second one I wrote off since it was already in use by the real Utah team” Caro explains herself before she goes around and deletes every mention of Centre Bell, while also changing Canadiens for Constellations. Especially since she sees that her viewers are generally in favor of these proposed changes.

But at the cost of some words, though, and this makes her scramble to start writing the following chapter before the stream ends as her migraines mount. And she only got some relief for these headaches after Glitter left the voice chat and the stream.