Rachel Reid loves Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie’s take on Shane and Ilya so much that she had to stop watching Heated Rivalry while writing their next book — because picturing the actors during the sex scenes was getting a little too distracting.
Apparently even the woman who created Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov is not immune to the Heated Rivalry effect.
Author Rachel Reid has revealed that while writing Unrivaled — the seventh and final book in her Game Changers series — she deliberately stopped rewatching the hit television adaptation.
Not because she disliked it.
Quite the opposite.
“I watched it as it came out,” Reid said during a 29 September stop on her Heated Rivalry Deluxe Edition tour in New York.
“Then I just said, ‘OK, I can’t watch it again until this book is done because I just need to focus on what I’m doing.’”
The problem was that actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie had become just a little too convincing as Shane and Ilya.
“It’s very difficult to write sex scenes when you’re thinking about Connor and Hudson,” Reid joked.
“It’s very weird.”
Honestly, understandable.
Keeping book Shane and Ilya separate
Reid stressed that her self-imposed viewing ban was not criticism of the television adaptation.
“I love everything about the show,” she said.
“I love everything they did with the characters, but I just needed to stay focused on my version.”
That distinction matters because the television series has inevitably developed its own interpretation of characters who previously existed entirely in Reid’s imagination — and those of her readers.
Williams plays Canadian hockey superstar Shane Hollander, while Storrie plays his Russian rival and secret longtime lover Ilya Rozanov.
The series, created by Jacob Tierney, premiered in November 2025 and rapidly expanded the audience for Reid’s novels.
Reid had already seen rough cuts of early episodes before the show debuted, but the sheer scale of the response once viewers met Williams and Storrie changed the experience of writing the characters again.
Suddenly, everybody was waiting
Reid last centred Shane and Ilya in The Long Game, published in 2022.
That novel continued the relationship established in Heated Rivalry and provides much of the source material expected to inform season two of the television series.
Returning to them for Unrivaled therefore meant writing characters she had known for years — except now millions more people had opinions about them.
“It was challenging writing Unrivaled for a lot of reasons,” Reid said.
“But I think the biggest was just the increased expectations.”
She said her readership had gone from a comparatively small but dedicated group to feeling as though “the whole world was waiting to see what happened next”.
That is a fairly dramatic change for characters who began life in a niche queer hockey-romance series.
‘People have fallen in love with this slightly different version’
Rather than sounding protective about the television interpretation, Reid appears genuinely excited that Shane and Ilya now belong to a larger creative world.
“It’s a big change,” she said.
“At the same time, people have fallen in love with this slightly different version of the characters on the show.”
She credited Tierney and the production team with helping the story reach an audience far beyond the books’ original readership.
“There’re so many more people who have some ownership of these characters and are responsible for these characters, which I think is really beautiful,” Reid said.
“It’s really exciting to have other people to talk to about these characters, whose job it is to tell their story. It’s not just me.”
For queer adaptations in particular, that expansion can be significant.
A romance that already had a passionate LGBTQ+ readership has now become a mainstream television phenomenon — without removing the central gay relationship that made the books resonate in the first place.
Unrivaled has been delayed
Fans hoping to immediately find out what happens next will need some patience.
Unrivaled was originally scheduled for publication on 29 September 2026, but Reid announced earlier this year that the release had been moved to 1 June 2027.
Reid has been open about the reasons.
She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2023 and revealed in February that her symptoms had worsened, making writing physically more difficult and slower.
She also said the sudden attention created by Heated Rivalry’s success had dramatically changed her schedule and reduced the uninterrupted time she had available to work.
“The writing is going well,” she told fans when announcing the delay.
She simply needed more time to finish the book to the standard she wanted.
A bigger queer phenomenon than she expected
The television adaptation has created something Reid could hardly have anticipated when Heated Rivalry was first published.
Shane and Ilya are now interpreted simultaneously by readers, actors, writers, directors and a fandom dissecting practically every look, kiss and hockey jersey.
Reid seems comfortable with that.
What she needed while finishing Unrivaled was simply enough distance to hear her own version of the characters again.
And if that meant temporarily avoiding Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie having extremely convincing sex on television?
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for literature.
