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  • Guest Post and Giveaway: Except for the Part Where We Have No F***ing Idea by J.A. Rock

Today I am so excited to welcome the awesome J.A. Rock to Joyfully Jay! J.A. has just released her new book, Calling the Show, which I reviewed here earlier today (and totally loved!). She has also brought along a copy of Calling the Show to give away to one lucky commenter. Awesome! So please join me in giving her a big welcome!

In my new novel, CALLING THE SHOW, theater students Jesse and Sim go from enemies to hula hooping partners to lovers to… dominant and submissive? They’re not sure.

I’ll try not to divulge TMI from my personal life here, but I will say that I was Jesse’s age, 22, when I first actively pursued a D/s relationship. I knew long before that I was BDSM oriented, but it took years to get up the courage to do anything about it, and I spent a lot of that time imagining what living the lifestyle would be like.

I recently had the good fortune to discover Jane Davitt and Alexa Snow’s novel Bound & Determined. There’s a wonderful scene where the submissive MC is waiting for his first taste of the riding crop. What he’s excited about is the “newness” of it—though it’s a sensation he’s been fantasizing about for some time.

“He could feel Owen reaching to the bed, and his whole body tensed up with the knowledge of what was coming.

Except for the part where he had no f***ing idea.”

Best line ever.

It’s kind of like skydiving. You can anticipate how it will feel to jump out of the plane. You can try to construct the sensation of falling based on how it felt to jump from the top stair down to the landing when you were a kid, or how it feels to go down the first hill of a roller coaster. And when you finally do take that leap, maybe it feels a lot like you imagined it would.

Except for the part where you had no f***ing idea.

To me, the most exciting moments in life come from the disparity between what we think we want and what we get. We all have the things we dream about doing, and often the reality doesn’t match up with the dream. But it’s the unexpected that opens new doors to us, in our travels and careers, in love, in the act of creating.

In CALLING THE SHOW, Jesse is chronically anxious, inexperienced both sexually and in relationships, and has an unfortunate habit of saying the wrong thing to Sim approximately every two minutes. So he’s got enough on his plate trying to launch what he assumes will be a vanilla relationship. But when he and Sim realize they’re both interested in kink, things become more complicated. They each have activities they’ve fantasized about, and they find willing participants in each other. Sometimes the reality is better than their fantasies, sometimes it’s worse, and often it’s just different. They eventually discard the labels “dominant” and “submissive,” because what they do together doesn’t necessarily fit with their preconceived notions of what those words mean.

I mentioned a while back on my blog that I initially mocked the friends who tried to teach me to hula hoop last year. I thought hula hooping was for kids, that it would be boring, and that I’d be awful at it.

Hooping is now one of my favorite activities. I’m no rock star at it, but I’m not irredeemably horrible. It’s far from boring, and for over a year now I’ve been unable to stop discretely poking my hard abs.

Jesse has a similar aversion to learning to hoop. But giving it a try leads to something even better than a six-pack—it leads to a relationship with Sim, which brings more risks, more opportunities, more feelings Jesse has no f***ing idea how to deal with.

When we try something for which we’ve already imagined an outcome, we take a chance beyond whatever physical or emotional risks that activity entails. We risk the unknown, the unfamiliar space between our jumping point and where we actually land.

CALLING THE SHOW is, at its core, a book about self-discovery and taking chances. It’s about the way life slaps us in the face (or elsewhere) when we decide we already know how something is going to turn out.

Because we all have a sense of what’s coming, right?

Except for the part where we have no f***ing idea.


Thank you so much to J.A. for stopping by today. And if you want a chance to win a copy of Calling the Show, be sure to leave a comment below.  The contest will stay open until Friday, July 27th at 11:59 pm EST.

  • By entering the contest, you’re confirming that you are at least 18 years old.
  • Winners will be selected by random number.
  • If you win, you must respond to my email within 48 hours or another winner will be chosen. Please make sure that your spam filter allows email from Joyfully Jay and leave your email address if it is not in your profile.
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