I am sitting here trying to figure out what to say. Or rather how much to say since I know going in that I will have to narrate this and the EOBS for Turning Back was monumentally long and filled with things that probably make no sense at all, so I’m trying to come up with a plan of attack so I don’t get sidetracked and longwinded.
So what’s a girl to do? I went into my fan group and asked them for help. Terry Schott, my friend and kick-ass writer of the hit SF thrillers series, The Game is Life, says he thinks that since 321 EOBS starts with, “So I was cruising through some porn one night…” he just assumes they all start that way. Fucking Terry.
They don’t all start with porn. This series really didn’t start with porn. It started with that Forbidden City episode of Seinfeld. It’s a long story and I think I explained it somewhere else, so I’m not gonna explain it now. But the game… now the game actually did not start with a sit-com or porn. It started with the characters. I knew Smith, Quin, and Bric were all going to fulfill a need with Chella in some very specific way. I had that from the very beginning. But what I didn’t have, and thought out along the way, were the reasons each of these men were playing the game too.
I came up with Bric’s background as I was writing that one chapter in Turning Back where he admits to Chella that he comes from a very large family and I tossed around the idea that it was a polygamist family, but decided not to commit to that until I was ready to write His Turn. So I left it all open-ended. I knew there was going to be a family crisis in Bric’s book and he would have to take the girl along with him and expose something private about himself. But other than that, I wasn’t sure what would happen when they got there.
I don’t really have a lot of opinions on polygamy. I don’t know enough about it to be honest. I think most relationships, even very non-traditional ones, can work if people are invested. I think that was the whole theme of His Turn. In the beginning Bric wasn’t truly invested in anything and by the end, he is. I think Nadia was like that, as well. They are very much alike in this respect. In fact, they might more alike than any other couple I’ve created so far.
It was kinda cool to explore people who clash because they are too much alike instead of being opposites, because that can be a problem. Maybe opposites attract for a reason? Other than the laws of fucking physics, right? Ionic bonding and magnetism and all that shit. Maybe when you’re attracted to your opposite they complete something inside you that’s missing?
I kinda believe that (as long as the differences aren’t too insurmountable).
Which presents a problem for couples who are too much alike. Especially when they both like to be in control. I am the first to admit that I’m a control freak. I like being an Indie author because I have complete, one-hundred percent control over just about everything. Sure, the distributors can really fuck with my day if they want to. The Zon can change rules and one email from them can turn my whole world upside down. But they are a global corporation, so even though they write the rules, they also try and abide by them. I can trust them not to fuck with me too hard. So even if I get a bullshit email from them complaining about my table of contents being in the back of the book and threatening to take it off sale, I can shoot back a logical response and eventually, if I make a big enough deal about it, someone in power—someone I can trust to make logical decisions—will get back to me and sort it out.
Trust is the key word here. People who like to be in control only give it up to others they can trust.
Smith learned to trust Chella. That was the easiest relationship of them all because both Chella and Smith are logical, responsible people who have made good decisions in their lives. Chella learns to trust Smith when she figures out he’s not really a dick, he’s just stuck in this weird outdated worldview because he thinks his money will corrupt him. And Smith learns to trust Chella when he realizes she actually understands herself and her needs. She’s not really afraid of who she is or what she might be. She just needs to work through it, and she does that in a very step-wise fashion with her therapist and by playing the game. In fact, Smith and Chella are probably the least damaged of all these characters.
Quin and Rochelle are probably the most trusting of all the characters. Rochelle shows up and gives in. Immediately. She blindly (and probably simplistically) trusts these men to give her what she needs. She accepts the rules and moves on to build something with Quin. Quin is just one of those good guys. He didn’t need a lot of prodding to trust Rochelle. He just let the love happen. He probably got too complacent, but his issues were all about not being enough. And he had his friends to fill in the gaps. Opposites attract, right? But in this case, it was the oppositional aspects of his friends, and not Rochelle, who completed him. He just needed to learn how to get that on his own. Quin grew from beginning to end more than the others, in my opinion. Because Quin didn’t need Rochelle. He wanted her. And he gave up something very precious to him, something he did feel he needed, in order to keep her.
But Bric is a whole other animal, man. He’s fucked up. I could’ve written so much more about his dark mind but I didn’t want to lose sight of the story, which is the romance. And there was a romance, it just took Nadia and Bric almost the entire book to submit to it. Because submission requires trust. Giving in and letting someone else inside your darkness is a big fucking deal. Everyone has some kind of trigger event that makes them question things or even (cough) become cynical. So Bric grew up in a very specific way that made no sense to him, or, if I’m being honest, most people he probably encountered outside that family. He wanted to pretend it was something it wasn’t. Nadia forced his trust. He was having a vulnerable moment. Brother dead, family calling, plus he’d just lost the only people that made him feel normal. So her mind game on the way to Montana hit him pretty hard. Hard enough for him to hit back during the one moment Nadia decided to stop playing and trust him for real.
Trust is a big deal when you’re playing games like this. Hell, in anything, really. So now that the Turning Series is over I can look back on everything and try and make sense of it in a big picture way. And the big picture is… people get hurt or they have preconceived notions about themselves. And they don’t want to share that shit or experience it again so they come up with coping mechanisms. Smith and his weird view of money. Chella and her shame. Rochelle’s and Quin’s fears of turning into their parents. Bric hiding his family and Nadia hiding her mistakes. But when you fall in love trust is kind of a prerequisite, ya know?