Kennedy Blake learned to skate at four. By six she was the only girl in her brother’s hockey league, and when the coach gently suggested figure skating, she asked him whether he’d ever actually been checked into the boards. She had. She’d liked it.

She didn’t plan to write about hockey — it was just always there, the way weather is there. She studied English at the University of Minnesota, worked in marketing, did a stint in nonprofit communications, and spent years writing sentences about quarterly initiatives while the only thing she loved remained aggressively unprofitable.

She started her first romance novel on a whim during a rain delay at an outdoor game, on the back of a program, in pen. It took two years, three complete rewrites, and one critique partner honest enough to write no she would not in the margin fourteen times.

She writes curvy heroines who run the sport rather than watch it, and men who are smart enough to keep up and just barely fast enough to be interesting. Her books are funny on purpose. Nobody in them is ever asked to be smaller — not by the hero, not by the narrative, and certainly not by Kennedy, who has opinions about this.

Kennedy lives in Minneapolis with her rescue dog, Gretzky, who is named ironically and cannot be trusted near a puck. She still plays in a recreational league on Tuesday nights and is a significantly better winger than she is a morning person, which she admits is a low bar cleared sideways.