{"id":450195,"date":"2026-05-28T23:17:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/450195\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T23:17:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:17:10","slug":"heated-rivalry-author-rachel-reid-reveals-surprise-best-perk-of-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/450195\/","title":{"rendered":"Heated Rivalry Author Rachel Reid Reveals Surprise Best Perk of Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHeated Rivalry<\/a> author Rachel Reid says getting free desserts in restaurants, especially with her kids, is one of the best perks of fame.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDairy Queen has little ice cream cakes, and somebody brought over a tray of them for my whole family. And that was the first time my kids were like, this is great,\u201d Reid told The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>\u2019s Women in Entertainment<\/a> Canada event in Toronto on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer sudden fame for penning the\u00a0Heated Rivalry\u00a0book series that has been adapted into the popular Crave and\u00a0HBO Max<\/a>\u00a0romance drama about gay hockey players has also extended to when she leaves the house. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy. Authors aren\u2019t supposed to be recognized on the street. Actors, this is what they want. I\u2019ve been getting definitely more attention than I thought I would. I like some of it,\u201d Reid revealed.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer fame may only grow with the second season of the Heated Rivalry TV series, which Reid teased ahead of the 2027 premiere. \u201cI\u2019m excited for Troy and Harris. Can I say that?\u201d Reid blurted out as she pointed to hockey player Troy Barrett and Harris Drover, his love interest, who will have raised profiles in the next cycle of the queer TV romancer. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Heated Rivalry TV series success, besides seeing Reid\u2019s books translated into 35 languages worldwide, has also allowed the stigma around romance novels, especially with gay storylines, to fall by the wayside. \u201cI personally don\u2019t have to defend what I write about anymore, which is a great feeling. \u00a0Now I can say I wrote Heated Rivalry and people are very familiar with it. That\u2019s really nice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother revelation: the success of the book-to-screen adaptation on HBO Max and elsewhere internationally didn\u2019t surprise Reid. \u201cI felt when visiting the set I was the only person who understood what was going to happen. Early on, I was, this is going to be huge. I expected Connor and Hudson\u2019s lives to get very different, for the whole world to fall in love with them,\u201d she added during a conversation at the WIE Canada event with Jacob Tierney, who created, wrote and directed the gay hockey TV drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tHeated Rivalry is part of the book author\u2019s\u00a0Game Changer\u00a0series, which follows the steamy romance between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, played in the\u00a0Heated Rivalry drama\u00a0by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, respectively. Fame for Reid does have its downsides, however.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI have some social anxiety that I didn\u2019t have before. It\u2019s the worry of being video recorded. I\u2019m always worried about being secretly filmed or recorded. I\u2019m probably being paranoid for no reason,\u201d she volunteered. Getting off social media has helped tame that anxiety, Reid insisted, though Instagram remains her go-to platform.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe solution is I\u2019m not there anymore. It\u2019s pretty easy to walk away from,\u201d she explained. Reid added a new challenge may be writing books outside of the sport of hockey, and even the romance genre, whether that\u2019s a dark comedy or a screenplay. \u201cI\u2019d like to show myself that I can,\u201d she insisted.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut wherever her pen takes her, Reid said characters and their emotions will remain the foundations of her work. \u201cThe most important thing is nailing the character,\u201d she said with a double entendre about her Heated Rivalry books, where characters jump in and out of beds.<\/p>\n

\n\tReid will be publishing her seventh book,\u00a0Unrivaled, in the\u00a0Game Changers\u00a0series in June 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid says getting free desserts in restaurants, especially with her kids, is one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,3484,110172,111,139,69,82682,195668],"class_list":["post-450195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-hbo-max","tag-heated-rivalry","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-the-hollywood-reporter","tag-women-in-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}