Rachel Reid and Jacob Tierney appeared on stage at BookCon 2026 at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center. Jacob Tierney is the creator and showrunner of the television adaptation of 'Heated Rivalry'. The television series 'Heated Rivalry' premiered in the US in November 2025 on HBO Max and became a cultural phenomenon and one of HBO Max's most-watched new releases.
According to major media, the series has received 18 Canadian Screen Award nominations. The second season of 'Heated Rivalry' will be based on Rachel Reid's novel 'The Long Game'. Jacob Tierney outlined a more serious direction for the second season of 'Heated Rivalry'.
We don’t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often. It’s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.
Rachel Reid is facing health challenges that have impacted her writing schedule. She was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease in August 2023 and pushed back the release date of her upcoming novel 'Unrivaled' from September 2026 to June 2027 due to worsening symptoms. Rachel Reid is happy with the draft of her upcoming novel 'Unrivaled' but still making decisions about the plot.
She said 'Unrivaled' will explore the fallout of Shane and Ilya's relationship becoming public. Jacob Tierney's behind-the-scenes book 'I'll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1' will be released on October 13, 2026, by Little, Brown and Company.
I'm in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters. 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.
I've been writing it for about a year now. I was working on it secretly right up until January, when it was announced. I like it. I'm very happy with it.
I feel like more than any other book I’ve written, this one needs to be really good. I hope I’m giving people what they want out of this.
I hope what I want is what other people want. I still am making decisions about the plot with some things.
This is really where the world’s gonna judge them. There's gonna be people that are extremely excited and supportive of it – some of it in maybe a parasocial way, which isn't at all based on reality. And there will also be the other side: just blatantly homophobic and bigoted and terrible.
My life has gotten very different in the last couple months, and although it's all good, it's also taken away my ability to have quality time to write. And there’s nothing more important to me than Unrivaled being the best book it can possibly be.
When good things happen, sometimes the universe hands you some worse stuff to balance it out. For me, that’s been that my Parkinson's symptoms have gotten a bit worse, and it's made it difficult physically to write, so I'm definitely a lot slower.
There will be more Heated Rivalry on your TVs, like, truly, as soon as humanly possible.