The Long Game
The Long Game
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Rachel Reid on The Long Game
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The sequel her publisher almost didn’t let her writeBefore any contract existed, she had already decided the story wasn’t finished. The plan was always to return to Shane and Ilya, even if the format had to be informal.
I had always planned to write more of their story one way or another, even if it was a series of short stories.
The structural obstacle was real: a sequel to the second book in a series becoming the sixth entry struck her publisher as odd enough to warrant a refusal. What changed the answer was reader demand, not a pitch. By the time the green light came, she could say exactly what the book owed those readers.
The Long Game will be book #6 in the Game Changers series. Just to be clear, this will be a full-length Shane and Ilya novel that will give them a more definite happy ending. More of a ‘happily ever after’ than a ‘happy for now’.
The book’s dedication reads ‘Thanks for making this happen,’ addressed directly to Shane and Ilya fans. That line is the closest she comes to explaining the economics of how the sequel got written at all.
With the go-ahead secured, she arrived at the project with a specific imbalance in mind. The first book about these characters had centered Shane’s interiority, and she felt the debt to Ilya had been accumulating since then.
Heated Rivalry was more of a Shane book, and The Long Game is more of an Ilya book.
How she wrote it
Rough on both of them, by designShe had written the earlier Game Changers books without a fixed series arc, treating each as potentially the last. A sequel required managing continuity across five prior novels, and she hadn’t built the scaffolding for it.
That writing a sequel is really hard!
Beyond continuity, the structural problem was emotional: a romance sequel where the couple is already together has no dramatic engine unless both characters fail in ways that feel earned. At a Barnes & Noble event in New York, she described what that cost her at the page level, and why Shane bore the heavier burden of it.
The Long Game was hard just all around because I had to be like pretty rough on both of them. They both had to make some pretty bad mistakes... especially Shane, because he had the hero’s arc. So he has to screw up in order to be the hero and improve. So that was hard. I mean, that fight that they have was hard. [paraphrased from audio]
Her rule for sex scenes has stayed consistent across the series, but in a sequel where the characters are already intimate, the standard became harder to meet. The deleted scene she posted on her blog in December 2021 illustrates what gets cut when the criterion isn’t satisfied.
It can’t just be inserted into the book, you know, to be hot or to be titillating. If the sex scenes are there for that reason, they are the ones that I cut from the book, because if it doesn’t move the plot forward, there’s no reason for it.
The wedding scene, which readers had been anticipating since the end of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ required her to imagine a ceremony for characters she knows better than herself. She drew on the one data point she had. The result is a scene with no custom vows and a first dance song chosen at the last moment by someone else.
It was kind of loosely based on my own wedding, which I was not interested in planning at all.
The song that ended up in the scene, Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds,’ doubled as a private marker. ‘It was a song I was listening to a lot while writing that book, so it was a little treat for me,’ she told Swooon. The detail is invisible to readers who don’t know it, which is exactly how she left it.
What she wants us to sit with
Charming, perceptive, sadShe describes Ilya in three words in her Fresh Fiction interview. The third word is the one the whole book is built around: years of secrecy and geographic dislocation have left a residue, and ‘The Long Game’ is the story of him finally looking at it.
Charming. Perceptive. Sad.
Shane’s frustrating behavior in the first half of the book is not a flaw in the narrative but its engine. She wants readers to hold both impressions of him at once: the character who gets things wrong and the character whose arc the whole series has been building.
Shane, I think, has the hero arc of the series. If you take their two books, Shane, I think, has the hero’s arc, and he’s my favorite character to write, especially from his point of view.
Shane’s autistic traits are present in the text but never named or diagnosed. She knows readers have noticed, and she has a considered position on why the ambiguity is not evasion. Her thinking about it also reflects how her own understanding of the character developed over time.
I think it’s plausible Shane might go the rest of his life without ever being diagnosed or even really thinking seriously about it. But to me, as the person who created him, that was definitely a part of his character, and it’s something that, as I continued writing him, became clearer as I myself learned more about autism.
The analytical attention the series attracts now exceeds anything she planned for. She accepts it with a mixture of genuine flattery and mild bafflement. The disclaimer matters because it sets the terms she actually wrote under.
I didn’t expect this book to be analyzed like The Great Gatsby when I wrote it. It’s really just a hockey romance.