Exclusive Interview

‘Heated Rivalry’ Author Rachel Reid Teases More Short Stories in Game Changers Universe

Before Heated Rivalry became the global phenomenon that it is, author Rachel Reid shared bonus scenes that didn’t make the final cut of her Game Changers books. Though Reid is currently working on Unrivaled and visiting the set of the adaptation’s second season, can readers expect any more short stories at some point?

“I’m hoping to get more short stories out there in the world,” Reid told Swooon. “I have a few that are, I would say, not fully written, but certainly ones I intend to finish and put out. Just fun little scenes from different characters’ points of view.”

Reid added that she likes to “play around with characters who didn’t get their own books” for those bonus scenes. Currently, most of Reid’s short stories stem from Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s Heated Rivalry and The Long Game. On her website, Reid posted Ilya’s perspective of the first book’s Las Vegas hookup, Ilya’s first Halloween in Ottawa, and more. A fan-favorite is “My Dinner with Hayden,” which sees Ilya and Shane have a tense dinner party with Shane’s best friend and his wife after the former figures out they’re in a relationship.

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Reid also wants to explore some moments that were only brought up in passing in the books. “There’s things that happened off-page in the books that weren’t on page, basically just because I never knew if another book was coming out or what was happening with the series,” she said. “So some some of those things I’ve been working on.”

Some fans wished they had read about Shane coming out as gay — while still keeping his relationship with Ilya secret — to his Montreal teammates. In Heated Rivalry‘s epilogue, which takes place a little over a year after Shane and Ilya go to the cottage, the development is mentioned after it already happened. Show creator Jacob Tierney confirmed that the coming out scene will play out in full in Season 2.

Reid previously explained to Swooon, “I didn’t do it because I really thought Heated Rivalry was gonna be the last book. I just didn’t know when I wrote it that there’d be more books, so I just kind of had to hurry things along. And I had just done a scene in Game Changer, where Scott comes out to his teammates, so I just didn’t want to write another one.”

She added that she’s excited to see how Tierney depicts the moment in the show. “In my head, it was always Shane doing it in a pretty low-key way, just like, quick one and done, and then everyone’s just not interested in really talking about it,” she explained. “Kind of like, it was there, it was known, but nobody was gonna ask about it, except for maybe his best friends on the team.”

What moment do you want to see expanded in short-story form? Comment below!