“It’s Not Something I’m Squeamish About”: Heated Rivalry Author on Writing Explicit Sex Scenes

Rachel Reid is the bestselling author of the Game Changers hockey romance series that includes Heated Rivalry, the TV adaptation of which (by director Jacob Tierney) has become a massive hit since it premiered on Crave in November. Rachel and I talk about how she, as someone who submitted the manuscript of her first novel without even telling her partner or her family, is handling the sudden explosion of attention, about the pressure she feels to make her next book worthy of this attention, and about her rules when it comes to writing explicit sex scenes.

The interview has been edited here for length and clarity.

How have these few weeks been for you? Because I’m assuming this is not your usual pace. This is not your usual level of visibility.

No, no, usually my level of visibility is almost none. It’s been very weird and overwhelming and amazing but kind of still really hard to believe. I can’t believe it’s such a short amount of time, but things have changed so much for me. I mean, just professionally, I’ve definitely kind of levelled up, as an author, to another category, doing things I never thought I would achieve, like the New York Times Best Sellers list. Being invited to a lot of events that usually bigger authors might get invited to. And also getting offered all of my travel expenses paid for—that kind of thing. Before, it’d be more like a “Would you like to come to this convention? It costs $500 for a table” kind of thing. And now it’s “We would like to fly you here and put you up in a hotel and pay you.” And so, it’s just in the last couple of weeks that that’s changed a lot, and obviously, my book sales have gone up a lot, and just generally, everybody is very familiar with my characters and my story, which is a very unusual and amazing feeling.

When you are at these conventions, even the ones you’re being flown to, and being put up in these hotels, are you still reflexively, like, stealing shampoo and putting soap in your bag and going like, “I could use this stuff”?

Yeah, you know, I was put in the Four Seasons in Toronto for the premiere, and I felt like a hick, like I don’t belong here. And they had these maple toffees, and I was dumping them in my purse every day. Because I was like, I mean, free toffee!

One thing I noticed—and I wonder if this is going to change—is when I was looking to contact you, I was like, “Well, I’m probably going to have to go through six different levels of management and agents.” And then I looked on your website, and there’s a line literally saying, “Here’s my email address. If you want to talk to the real me, it’s really easy.”

I might have to change that. I just hired a publicist, because I have been getting a lot of emails—more than I can read, more than I can respond to—and probably some of them are good and should be responded to. I mean, things like a Rolling Stone interview request had gotten buried in my inbox. And I was like, “See, that shouldn’t get buried.” So things like that. It’s not like a one-person job anymore, I guess, being me.

I do feel like—and I don’t want to push you to say anything necessarily negative about all of this right now. I mean, because, again, it’s been so astounding and so quick. But I’ve always felt that becoming really self-conscious about what it is you write and becoming very aware that there’s a lot of eyes on it can be very difficult. It can prevent you from being free and creative and just getting into it and making mistakes. But have you already started to find that when you try to write, you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t just going to be me. This is going to be the world. This is going to be, like, on Times Square.”

Knowing that it might be very important for my next book to be a really good one is definitely putting new pressure on me. I mean, I always want my books to be good, but after something like this, you want your next release to kind of live up to the hype. So, I’m definitely feeling that right now on top of not really having much time to write. It’s not that I think I’ll write another Heated Rivalry, but I want something to be, like, good enough for the new fans, because I have so many new readers.

And that’s a huge shift from where this all started. You submitted that manuscript for the first Game Changer book without telling anybody, not even your partner.

I told him after I submitted it, over dinner. I think it was his birthday. Actually, I was just like, “Look, I gotta tell you something. It probably isn’t gonna go anywhere, but I did this thing.” And then I told my parents two days before the book came out. I was just like, “Well, I gotta tell them, because they’re gonna find out, right?” But, yeah, I was so self-conscious about people reading what I wrote at all, but especially people that I knew reading what I wrote. I mean, I guess part of that is just the nature of what I write. It’s, you know, it’s sexually explicit fiction and romance and all sorts of things that people might have strong opinions about or be a little shocked by. I’m glad I was able to get over that. It did take a while, but I’ve become more and more comfortable over the years talking about what I write. I guess I’ve had more and more people tell me that they like it. It makes it easier, of course.

But now, with the show, I was nervous for most of this year about the show bringing a potentially much bigger audience to the story of my characters. It’s one thing to have your story exist within the bubble of romance readers and writers. But then when you take it outside of that, you’re kind of inviting people to be very dismissive of it, or to make fun of it. And I was worried about that, but I haven’t seen much of that. That’s for sure. It’s been really, really positive.

There’s also the risk. And I mean, Jacob Tierney has a lot of credibility as a creator, and he approached it with a lot of integrity. It wasn’t just like, “We’ll take a little bit that we kind of like, and we’ll just throw away the rest.” He seemed really committed to keeping the kind of vision that you had. But there’s always that risk of this thing coming out, people hating it, and therefore, that reflecting on you, and they’re being like, “Oh, you, your books must be crap, because this thing I saw on TV was crap.”

Yeah. I mean, it’s always scary, like something that only has your name on it suddenly having so many other people involved. You have to kind of trust a lot of people, or just hope that they don’t do anything bad with it. I really trusted Jacob right from the very beginning, because he just immediately showed me that he had a lot of respect for what I wrote and wanted to do a really good job of adapting it. He wanted to take it seriously, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting at first. And I was, you know, I thought, like, there could be an adaptation that sort of makes this a bit of a joke, but it wasn’t like that at all.

He wanted to take it very seriously and be quite faithful to it, which I thought was impossible to film, but he wanted to do it, and I think it was really brave of him. And I also think it’s why it’s been so well received, because people can see how much he loved these books, how much he wanted to get it right, how much he wanted to get it right for me and for the fans—for himself—and didn’t want to compromise. And I think all of that comes through. And I’m very, very lucky that he read my books and wanted to do this. Because, yeah, he did an amazing job.

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I want to just take that for a second, that idea of the sex in the books and the explicit sex. And you mentioned that was something you were a little embarrassed by before the books came out. You were like, “People are going to be reading me writing about sex.” And Jacob has said that he was worried at the start about trying to film the explicit sex and getting it on the screen. But he made a really interesting comment about the stories that you wrote, which is that the sex is character development.

This is a weird sort of nerdy tangent. It made me think about a review I read years ago of the second Matrix movie—that the fight scenes in the original Matrix were all character development, they were all story. It was about learning something, about revealing something.

Is that kind of part of your philosophy around sex writing, that it needs to be storytelling in another form?

Yeah, yeah. For me, it definitely does. It can’t just be inserted into the book, you know, to be hot or to be titillating. If the sex scenes are there for that reason, they are the ones that I cut from the book, because if it doesn’t move the plot forward, there’s no reason for it. It’s just making the book longer. And I approach them the same way I do the hockey scenes. I would not write a hockey scene that’s just, like, a play by play of a game that’s imaginary. It has to have some dialogue and storytelling and plot development that moves things forward, because otherwise, there’s no point. There’s no point in just putting a bit of hockey on the page because it’s a hockey romance and you need some hockey in it. Those scenes also need to tell a story. So, I kind of do approach the hockey and the sex exactly the same way.

But I think you have to enjoy it, you have to enjoy writing them. Because, sometimes, I’ve heard authors say in interviews that they kind of just close their eyes and write a sex scene, or they’re difficult for them to write. But I do enjoy writing them, and I think that helps. It’s not something I’m squeamish about. I do enjoy writing them, probably more than the hockey scenes.

While your books were coming out and before this year hit, did you have to deal with voices of, let’s say, you know, insufferable literary snobs, like me, who are maybe like, “What are you doing?” Like, “What’s this?”

I mean, definitely some people are like, “You could write real books.” I have gotten a bit of it, but I also feel like romance, since the pandemic, has become much less of a guilty pleasure. I guess it’s become something that more and more people got into and stopped being ashamed of talking about, and there’s so much community around it now—I haven’t heard as much of that. I mean, I remember I joined the local writers’ group at my library, and right away, when I said I wrote romance, the room was pretty dismissive. They said, “Do they send you a formula and you just write to that?” I think you’re always going to get that. The literature scene in Nova Scotia is very lit fic focused and very local interest, nonfiction focused. I’m not really in with the literature scene, but that’s okay. I do realize that my books are a little different.

Well, I also feel that anybody who was saying that maybe a year ago has probably gotten that Gmail address off your website and is like, “Hey, Rachel . . .”

I have been getting more local attention. Yeah, suddenly, a lot of local media outlets have been reaching out to me, saying they’re very proud of me as a local author. So yeah, maybe it’s changing.

Well, smartly, I started writing the book I’m working on now back in the spring, because I could see some of this coming, like, maybe not on the level that it’s been. But I was like, “I’d really like to get as much of this book written as possible before the show comes out, just in case.” And then I told my publisher that I don’t want to announce the book or talk about it or say anything about it, because I don’t like talking about what I’m working on until as late as possible. And so, they very generously pushed the announcement of this book to January, when normally, it would have been months sooner.

It’s given me a lot more quiet time to write without having to talk about it. But that deadline is coming up, and it’s been really difficult these last few weeks to find time to write, because everyone just wants to talk about Heated Rivalry, which is awesome but also not what I’m writing at the moment. I feel a little bit of urgency to write as much as possible. I was hoping to get the book at least two-thirds done before it gets announced. I don’t know if I’m going to hit that mark, but that was the goal, and I have less than a month now before that happens. But then, these are not terrible problems to have.

Adapted from the podcast What Happened Next, produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock in partnership with The Walrus. Listen to the full conversation here.