goaltender interference research & sources
It’s hard to believe that Goaltender Interference is a little under three weeks from release and equally hard to believe this is my last contracted Penalty Box book. After writing on a deadline for the last two years, part of me is relieved to have the space to breathe a little, and to switch back to fantasy.
Still, with regard to GI, there’s some news and movement: ARCs went up on Netgalley a few weeks back, and I got confirmation about the audiobook narrator, namely, that Cooper North won’t be involved this time. This particular news was a bit bittersweet. I really loved Cooper’s work on the first three books in the series (and had been looking forward to hearing him say some very specific lines in GI). Still, after listening to some samples, I’m also really excited to hear Keval Shah’s work bringing Matt and Aiden to life, and I’m sure that he’s going to do an amazing job.
Due to Life™, my own personal work that I’d hoped to get done simultaneous to release is lagging a bit behind schedule. There will be two “extras” released with Goaltender Interference (and at some point I need to finish the second one for Home Ice Advantage). The first, which is completed but won’t go out until the day of release, is a set of three prequel stories called would you promise to be kind (if you’ve seen them in another form elsewhere, no you haven’t). I would recommend reading WYPTBK after you read the novel because there is a deeper inherent tragedy in knowing that things are going to end in disaster that isn’t there otherwise. The second, which I am in the process of writing, is set immediately after Goaltender Interference ends, and stars two of Matt’s rookies working through some shit.
As is tradition, I like to do a little deep dive regarding the research and inspirations for my books. There’s one for: Game Misconduct, Delay of Game, and Home Ice Advantage, and I have a full bibliography of sources linked both here and on my website (both need a bit of updating).
Although all of my books are set in a linked universe, and all of them are personal to some extent, Goaltender Interference is really, uh…I don’t know how else to say this. The book of my heart? I have had Matt and Aiden in my head, knocking around in there, for almost five years now, and they feel as real to me as real people do. I know pretty much every detail about their lives, from childhood up through their 50s, and I’ve probably written over 200,000 words total about them, not even counting the book. A lot of it will never see the light of day, but it’s just there. When you’re reading GI, all of that history and thought and effort is behind them, even beyond the words that are actually on the page.
Beyond the length of time I’ve been living with these characters, they also lead to some personal discoveries and changes. I’ve really strongly debated about how much detail I want to go into when discussing this topic, because part of me wants to be honest and open about my creative process, particularly because I have a feeling some readers might not agree with some of the creative decisions made in this book. And part of me feels like this isn’t actually anyone’s business but mine. Ultimately, here I am, writing this newsletter, about Aiden and what he has meant to me.
Aiden
From the time I got into hockey, I’ve always been fascinated with goalies. You’ve probably heard the jokes about how weird goalies are and everything related to it. And as a bit of a weirdo myself I’ve always been interested in digging in to that. And the more I read, the more I found I related to the mindset. Of course you’d be considered a bit odd if you are out there on your own, ultimately responsible for the team’s wins and losses. Of course you’d be a bit different than the rest of the team when your experiences aren’t the same as the rest of the team’s, when they spend time chatting on the bench during the game, but you’re basically out there, alone. Of course you would have to devote yourself obsessively to learning the position, to seeking insane and minute improvements, to give you an edge over everyone else. The more I read, the more it made sense that goalies would think the way they do, that some of them have mantras they repeat to themselves the way they do, that so many of them seem to struggle with anxiety, control issues, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Like wow, I could relate.
Aiden, especially, emerged from that desire to really dig in and understand the goalie mindset—does the position make people this way, or are people who are this way naturally drawn to the position? The more I wrote him, the more my own quirks and preferences and habits bled into his character. Of course he’d eat the same thing every day for fifteen years when he was living by himself and didn’t have anyone to cook for: food is a means to an end so you might as well keep eating something you like and are used to and is safe and always appetizing and won’t distract you too much from other things you need to do. Of course he’d had a rigid routine that helped him deal with the anxiety and uncertainty of the major league season and has trouble when that routine no longer applies to his life anymore. Of course he has really intense superstitions and rituals related to the game. Of course he fidgets or bounces or picks at his skin when he’s nervous or overwhelmed. Of course he’s a little bit socially awkward and has trouble figuring out exactly what people mean if they’re not absolutely clear about their intentions—he’d been focused on only hockey, his deepest love and interest, for so long that he missed a lot of regular social development. All of it made sense to me: all of these qualities are things that I have or do (obviously not in a hockey context).
So when early readers read the book and said, oh, Aiden’s autistic autistic, I said, no, I just gave him some of my little quirks. To which most of my friends replied: Ari. Please. Since then I have discussed extensively with my therapist, read a lot, and done some self testing and self evaluating and talking to other neurodivergent friends, and looked at…pretty much everything about my life and my family. So writing this book ended up being the kind of self-discovery experience you often have with fiction, but not in a way I had expected. This has been a pretty tough experience of revaluating everything.
Still, the thing I—and Aiden—struggled with was whether to undergo an assessment. There are, unfortunately, many reasons an adult might not want an official diagnosis on the record and right now isn’t the right time for me. Which led to some questions: do I write this character and have him claim something I still feel like I’m faking? Does it make sense for him to do this? Ultimately, I decided that, for Aiden just as it was for me, it didn’t fit with where he was as a character for him to have received, or been open about, a diagnosis by the end of the book. But he, and I, are in the same boat.
With that being said, there’s a lot of other goalie things that did make it into the narrative, not the least of which were the set routines and the insane levels to which some professional goalies take them, and the mantras. There are other legendary stories about how weird goalies are—you can look up pretty much any compilation of Ilya Bryzgalov quotes, for example (“the universe is humongous big” etc), stories about Marc-Andre Fleury thanking his posts in French and English, Alex Lyon being asked about his rituals and saying he had to stop doing them because it was basically turning into OCD. These guys are islands, and they’ve all got their little coping strategies, whatever they may be, however successful they may be.
I gave Aiden some words from both Holtby and Devin Cooley. Holtby’s seems like excellent mindfulness, but you could easily see how someone looking at it the wrong way might take things too far:
I have no future.
I have no past.
I’m here to make the moment last.
I’m in the here and now.
Holtby talked about it more in The Players’ Tribune, and I found it such a simple illustration of why goalies are the way they are:
It’s 99% mental.
The only thing that can exist in the world is that next shot.
When I’m playing my best, I’m barely thinking. I’m barely hearing anything. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you the songs that they play in the arena, even during warmups. I don’t even hear the crowd. Nothing. There’s no future. No past. Nothing going on at home. No save percentage. Nothing. You’re just there.
That’s why I try to never even show any emotion on my face, good or bad. People probably think … well, I don’t know what people think about me. But when I step onto the ice, I’m in a different place.
Whether I stop the puck or it goes in, I do the same thing afterward. I squirt the water bottle and I follow one drop all the way down to the ice. It’s just a little ritual to keep me focused. We’re just here, trying to stop the next puck, you know?
Devin Cooley’s mantras, just casually discussed in a press scrum on the other hand, made me both laugh and want to give this poor man a hug:
I just try to stay in the present moment. I just keep repeating to myself, like, there are no thoughts. There is no future. There are no thoughts. There is no future. I just said that over and over and over again. So that way, I could just take it one save at a time… I look up, I’m like, wow, a goal on 40 shots or whatever. I’m like, I feel good. It’s just like, like nobody cares. You know, nothing’s really gonna matter. We’re all gonna die.
So this focus only on the present seems like a pretty common goalie strategy, to get you through the tough games, the tough misses…but how might that ruin someone’s life if, for example, they could only look at the present, if they could only see hockey, if they couldn’t imagine a life or a future without it, even when someone they loved was begging them to do it? That’s where the crux of the problems with Aiden and Matt’s first relationship originated: Aiden couldn’t see how they could be together in the way that Matt wanted and still play hockey. And he was hockey. And he couldn’t imagine life another way.
At the start of the book, Aiden’s lost hockey anyway, and he’s suffering. He’s deeply depressed without realizing that’s what he’s feeling. Not only has he lost hockey, he’s lost his whole identity, everything that made Aiden Aiden for the last thirty-seven years. The book is, in a large part, his journey of starting to piece together who Aiden is without hockey and what that means for him in the future (spoiler alert: it does also involve hockey, in a way).
So in conclusion: goalies are weird, but there’s a reason for it. The more you read about them, the more it just sort of fits. And that was where Aiden emerged: the intersection of the effect playing this kind of position has/how it attracts a certain kind of personality, and my own personal understanding of that kind of personality.
Matt
Matt might not be as vulnerable a character for me as Aiden was, but he’s one of my favorites in the series. There were a few things that went into Matt: I wanted to write about a superstar at the end of his career, I wanted to write about a player dealing with long-term chronic injuries but not at quite the level Danny was, and I wanted to write about legacy and history and the Monteal Canadians, who have become something of a special interest (hah) for me over the years. I first got into the Canadiens in 2020, after they played my beloved Flyers in the bubble playoffs and lost, but left an impression. Following them through their Cup run the next year was one of the most joyful and devastating sports experiences of my life, right up there with the Flyers in ‘97. The more I read about both the current team and the history of the team, the more I knew I wanted to set the book in Montreal, and that the identity of the team and what it meant to the city would be almost as important for Matt as the game was itself.
So for context, the Montreal Canadiens really are both an entire province’s identity, almost a religion, and have the kind of history that most sports teams could only dream of. They have 24 Cups, they are the oldest team in the league, and their old barn was so beloved and full of magic that there are still lingering tales about curses and ghosts. Of course I had to adopt all of that into the book (how can you not be romantic about hockey, etc). They’re called by another name, obviously, but if you read any book about the Habs, you’ll understand where the Royal came from and why a character like Matthew Safaryan would fall so deeply in love with the team and the city and the ways in which they are inextricable from each other.
As a man, Matt developed partially as a foil for Aiden, someone sweet and (at the time of the book, anyway) well-adjusted and steady and patient, but also with his own history of darkness that he’s reckoning with and trying to convince everyone he’s moved on from. A man who’s been struggling through pretty constant pain and discomfort for the last few years, but who isn’t ready to give up hockey yet. Someone who truly understands what the Royal mean to the city of Montreal, someone who thinks deeply about his own role in that, what he can provide for the fans. Someone who’s done a lot of work on himself and is maybe a little too reliant on Stoic philosophy.
One of the things I feel is important in my books is to portray relationships that might be a little messy, with characters so far from perfect, but they’re deserving of love anyway because they are human and they’re trying. Matt’s basically been head over heels in love with Aiden from the first time they met eyes in the handshake line, despite the fact that Aiden’s broken his heart so resoundingly several times over the course of their 15 year history. This isn’t the kind of relationship I usually enjoy writing, but there was also something poignant about trying to untangle Matt’s feelings about the whole thing: just how deeply he loved the young man Aiden was, how hard it was on Matt to lose him, the work he’s done on himself to be a functional adult since his tailspin and rock bottom moments, but still with that constant ache of a missing piece. And the joy and terror of getting Aiden back, but not knowing how to help him deal with his own darkness.
Characters like Matt—caretakers, steady and reliable adults who have their shit together, and a secret messy side that only a few people have seen—aren’t always easy for me to write, but I love him so much. He and his serious face and his earnestness and his concern with his legacy and what he could still potentially give to Montreal are so important to me. And there’s a lot of quotes from varying captains that have gone into that kind of mindset, but also just…the deep dives into the Habs’ history. As I was writing I had this piece in my head the whole time:
“Quebec can win, even though it is through inevitable suffering.” Like Jesus, what a line. That melancholy combined with the way you feel when you see a post in r/Habs about a father taking his three-year-old daughter to her first game, what a magical formative experience it was for her, all of the other commenters sharing their own experiences. A communal history of sorrow and joy.
That’s Matt. He gets it. He lives it. And he’s developed his own coping mechanisms, from years of therapy to reading Marcus Aurelius, a personal favorite of mine who I had always felt was sort of the ideal philosopher for a hockey player to get into, if you’ve ever read quotes about them playing through pain because the team needs them. I was thrilled to find that The Athletic article with book recommendations and to see that there actually was a player reading Marcus Aurelius. That was the final little quirk to round out Matt’s personality: his very bad habit of quoting philosophers when the last thing most people want in that situation.
The story
So this is the story of two men at similar crossroads in life: one of them handling it very badly, and one of them avoiding having to handle it at all. It’s about what happens when you meet your soulmate at the wrong time in your life, and what happens when you meet them again, but you have to learn how to live together when you’re both so much older and so different. It’s about learning who you are when the framework you’ve always had to understand that is gone. It’s about learning how to ask for help, but also about having to do the hard work yourself.
It’s always hard to publish these books and let go of the characters, to see what people have to say about them, good or bad. It’s even harder this time. Aiden and Matt are so special to me, and so is their story, and I hope that in January, you love them too.
Thanks for reading,
— Ari 🧡
(You can preorder the book here.)
Selected Sources
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I just truly adore everything about this, and also you.
I am SO excited for this release! The first two are in my top 5 books of the last few years.