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Life is full of moments of strange serendipity, where just the right thing comes along at just the right time to make or break a situation. For the writer of Heated Rivalry, Rachel Reid, that serendipity came in the form of a DM on social media just days after she was diagnosed with Parkinson's. The DM was the eventual showrunner for the HBO Heated Rivalry series, with a question that would change the author’s life.

“I think you followed me first,” Rachel Reid said to Jacob Tierney, the showrunner for Heated Rivalry at HBO, during a panel at BookCon 2026. “And I was like, ‘Is this real?’ and I was like, ‘It had the blue check mark, so yeah.’ And then you DMed me, and it was nice cause, I don’t know, I think I’ve talked about it a lot. I got diagnosed with Parkinson’s like three or four days before that. So, it was good timing. Nice to have a little boost.”

From there, it seems that the conversation about turning the Game Changers book series into a TV series moved fairly quickly. “And then we had a Zoom call the next day, I think. Or it was close to it.”

“It was very soon,” agrees Tierney. “I was shooting something, so I think it might have been like four days later, but yeah, I was like, I was in a bit of a panic because of that Washington Post article, and I was like, ‘If somebody else options these books, I’m gonna be very upset.”

“Meanwhile, it wasn’t even occurring to me that this would happen,” Reid responds. “I was like, ‘What?’”

“It was occurring to me, though!” Tierney exclaimed.

Watch the full Heated Rivalry panel from BookCon 2026 here:

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