“Heated Rivalry” Author and Director Bask in Unexpected Fame at BookCon

To the cheers and applause of thousands of BookCon attendees, “Heated Rivalry” author Rachel Reid and director-screenwriter Jacob Tierney walked onto the main event stage at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center. The two Canadians, who have been international celebrities for just a few months, still find themselves wondering if all the noise is for someone else.

“We don’t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often,” Tierney told The Associated Press just after their joint appearance, a highlight of the weekend gathering of predominantly young book fans. “It’s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.”

Since the first episode of “Heated Rivalry” premiered last November, Tierney’s adaptation of Reid’s “Game Changer” series featuring star-crossed hockey greats Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov has become a cultural phenomenon. The show has significantly boosted hockey’s popularity, established Reid as a leader in the thriving genre of sports romance fiction, and elevated lead actors Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya) to the status of Olympic torchbearers.

Tierney expects to begin filming the second season this summer, based partly on Reid’s second novel about Shane and Ilya, “The Long Game.” Meanwhile, Reid is working on a third installment, “Unrivaled,” with both projects scheduled for release in 2027.

The 46-year-old Tierney is a Montreal native, former child star, and award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the TV series “Letterkenny.” This October, Little, Brown and Company will release a collection of Tierney’s annotated scripts, “I’ll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1.”

Reid, 44, is a longtime hockey fan born Rachelle Goguen in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She chose her pen name for practical reasons—it’s easier to pronounce and remember. She’s been transparent about the impact of fame and her health challenges, posting an Instagram announcement in February that she was delaying the release of “Unrivaled” from this fall to next summer. During the BookCon panel, she acknowledged the pressure of writing under intense public scrutiny.

“I’m in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters,” she said. “I’m still determined to stick to what I’ve always done when I was writing, just kind of pretend I’m writing for me and I hope other people like it.”

The creators’ journey to success began with an unexpected connection. In August 2023, Reid received a devastating diagnosis of early onset Parkinson’s disease. Days later, she received an Instagram message from Tierney—someone she had never met but who would soon change her life in a dramatically positive way.

During their AP interview, Reid and Tierney spoke about their creative process and the phenomenon they’ve created. When asked if writing sex scenes was challenging, Reid was emphatic about her comfort with that aspect of her work.

“Honestly, I love writing them and I’ve never found that to be the difficult part. I think it might be the easiest part for me,” Reid explained. “Not to praise myself too much, but I think maybe that’s why people like the scenes. They weren’t hard for me. It’s not a scary thing.”

Tierney approached the intimate scenes from a storyteller’s perspective: “Sex is a language in this show, sex is a way that we watch this couple evolve over the course of a fairly long amount of time in terms of the story, eight years. And so the sex is different every time, a way of watching them evolve both separately and together.”

Both creators have developed a deep connection to their characters. When asked if Shane and Ilya feel real to them, Reid confirmed, “Yeah. That’s why I keep writing books about them, because they just keep talking. With other characters, I’ve written the books and they’ve left. But these guys just stick around.”

Reid acknowledged that she sees aspects of herself in Ilya, particularly his sense of humor: “It’s a little bit mean. I also kind of like to use humor to cover up emotions. I think I also notice things about people a bit, but maybe stay quiet about it.”

The show’s success has created an unusual challenge for Reid as she works on the next book. She jokingly told Tierney, “I wish I had never met them,” referring to the actors who portray her characters. “It is a challenge writing without thinking about somebody having to actually say or do what I’m writing. I’m trying to just block that out.”

Despite these challenges, Reid is committed to completing “Unrivaled” for its June 1, 2027 release date. “Hell or high water, it’s coming out,” she affirmed.

For both Reid and Tierney, the series represents something deeply personal. As Tierney noted, “I did not grow up with stories like this. We don’t as gay men, as queer people. We do not get to have happy endings in media very often.” Their work has not only brought them unexpected fame but has also filled a significant gap in representation—providing the kind of stories they themselves had longed to see.