Blind Pass

"This series was the first ice hockey romance that I read and I picked it up because the author’s name is Teagan. Is that a good reason? Probably not. But I was like, ‘Oh my God, there are more of us!’ This is the second book in the series. It’s an accidental marriage book. They get drunk, get married in Vegas and decide to stay married because he is a professional ice hockey player and doesn’t want to deal with the media circus of him accidentally marrying someone. So they stay married and he helps her pay for her grandmother’s care home because she recently lost her job. I read this book in 2021, and even to this day, there are scenes in it that I think about all the time. He’s a very grumpy, closed-off person—his ice hockey name is ‘the Beast’—and you see him being vulnerable. He’s got a scar on his face that he’s always been really self-conscious about. It comes to a point in the book where they’re trying to figure out why they got married when they were drunk, and he realizes it’s because she makes him feel safe and looks him in the eye when she’s talking to him, and not at his scar. I’m single, but every time I’ve tried dating, as soon as people find out about my disability, the conversations peter out very quickly. It’s very hard to get past that point. So I really connected with him having that vulnerability and turning to her. You’re showing someone something you’re really scared of showing the world. And she sees him and not the things that he’s anxious or insecure about. That really spoke to me. I wish I had a good answer. I was just reading so much, and I used to love writing. I used to keep little journals, with poetry and songs and short stories . Then, when I was doing GCSE, my English teacher was very judgmental, and it really put me off. Then, in sixth form, I ended up dropping out of English because I had too much on my plate. I went from writing all these stories and poetry to writing nothing after the age of 17. But during COVID I was reading all of these books, and I thought, ‘You know, I might write another short story.’ I was lying in bed, and if an idea came to me, I would write it down, even if it was two in the morning. A couple of days later, I would have a different idea. It came to a point where I had four or five chapters of a book. I thought, ‘I am writing, I can actually do this!’ So I wrote a book from start to finish and it took me six months. It was only about 50,000 words. That was the first book I ever wrote. Melting for You is actually my fifth book. The other ones I never sent off to anyone. They were just practice attempts to see if I could do it. During COVID, it gave me something to do with my days so that I wasn’t just trapped there staring at the same four walls. They were only for me and even my family never read them. When I started writing Melting for You, it felt different. I remember feeling, ‘This is something that I can imagine someone else reading.’ So that’s why I ended up sending it off. I wanted to write a book about someone with fibromyalgia because it isn’t something that you see a lot, and I think it’s important for people with disabilities to write about them. A lot of the time, when you see disability representation in a book, the author struggles with knowing what it’s like to live in that body. I was 24 when I started writing Melting for You and I was thinking about my future. Do I want to get married? Do I want to have kids? I came to the conclusion that I don’t want to have kids, because I don’t think I could give kids a good environment with my back the way it is. I wanted to have the catharsis of imagining what it would be like for someone with fibromyalgia to have children, run a business and give all of themselves the way that Ellis, the main character in my book, does. It was a therapeutic exercise for me. I hadn’t written a sports romance before, so I was like, ‘Why not try that?’ Yes, I didn’t have to do a lot of research. I knew ice hockey and I knew fibromyalgia. So it was an easier starting point than maybe a lacrosse book or something I have no idea about. I wanted the focus to be on Ellis’s fibromyalgia, so I didn’t want to spend too much time explaining the ins and outs of a brand-new sport I had no idea about. So that’s where ice hockey came in."