Today I am so pleased to welcome Aidan Wayne to Joyfully Jay. Aidan has come to talk to us about their latest release, Play It Again. Please join me in giving Aidan a big welcome!

Excerpt

Some of his tension left him once he looked at his channel and realized that nothing seemed wrong with it.

Except for the number of subscribers and comments.

“Thirty-thousand?” he whispered in quiet disbelief. “Where did you all come from?” Looking for clues, he scrolled through the comments he had gotten. The top comments on his most recent videos were still from usernames he recognized, but even his old videos had a massive amount of comments now, particularly his first several.

You’re pretty good man! Thanks for the videos.

Dovid was right, he’s adorable, isn’t he?

Great video.

I’m a vegetarian too!

=DDD

DOVID I LOVE YOU AND YOUR STUFF

Anyone else here from Don’t Look Now?

????!

Thanks for the rec, Dovid!

whats the big deal hes just irish

I’m a DLN fan, and I see what they mean about your voice.

Definitely earned the three adorables from me.

“Adorable?” Sam asked, bewildered. And who was Dovid? What was Don’t Look Now? Over half the comments mentioned one or the other or both. What in the world was going on?

When in doubt, Sam turned to google for an answer.

“Dovid, Don’t Look Now” immediately brought up a YouTube channel as well as a zillion other hits from everything to other social media websites to buzzfeed. Feeling a touch overwhelmed, Sam went to YouTube first.

The featured video was “Let’s Talk Let’s Players.”

Sam clicked it.

A young man wearing dark glasses was sitting in front of a wall covered in different colored dots arranged in various patterns. He was wearing a blue shirt that offset his tan skin and short, dark hair, and had arms that made Sam swallow just a little bit. “Hey, guys! This is Don’t Look Now with Dovid and Rachel. I’m Dovid, Rachel’s behind the camera, and today I wanted to talk to you about a YouTuber that I’ve discovered. Well, Rachel discovered him, fell in love with him—”

“I did not,” came a voice from behind the camera “—tell them the truth. From the beginning!”

“Guys, if I had eyes, I’d be rolling them right now.” Sam blinked. That explained the dark glasses he supposed. “But fine, fine. Okay, so you know how I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Rachel had gotten totally obsessed with this game, Dire Straits…she found a Let’s Player, introduced me to him and, well, we both like him a lot.”

“No,” Sam whispered. “No way. No way.”

“Now, first off, I want to go ahead and put it out there that I’m in no way sponsored by his channel. In fact, he doesn’t even know I’m doing this plug. But he’s only got like four hundred and something followers and, frankly, I think it’s criminal that more people don’t know about him.”

The video proceeded to go on (and on and on) about Sam’s merit, his voice, called him adorable (several different times), and wound down with, “so you all better go to his channel and show him some love. He really deserves it! Link here, as well in the description below. Don’t forget to follow Don’t Look Now on social media. All those links down below as well. As always guys, see you later! Well, I won’t,” a grin, the grin of someone who had made that joke dozens of times and still found it funny, “But you know what I mean.”

The video ended.

Sam glanced at the time stamp. Thursday, around seven-thirty. With the obvious time difference, that was after Sam had been in bed himself and wasn’t checking his messages.

He looked at Don’t Look Now’s subscriber count, and had to take a shuddering breath. Six million and some subscribers. Dovid was clearly a hugely popular vlogger on YouTube, and he’d just plugged Sam’s channel. Sam’s dinky little Let’s Play channel, with fifty videos and a lot of rambling.

Dovid had called his rambling adorable, and said his voice was smooth and soothing.

Sam swallowed and looked at his notifications again. He’d gotten fifty new subscribers in the last fifteen minutes.

He had utterly zero idea how to handle this and a Let’s Play video to record, because that’s what his regular followers knew to expect.

Oh dear.

Blurb

The videos are fun.

But it’s the host who has him coming back for more…

When Seattle-based blind YouTuber Dovid Rosenstein finds Sam Doyle’s Let’s Play channel, playitagainsam, he’s instantly captivated by the Irish gamer. Everything about Sam is adorable, from his accent to his personality, and Dovid can’t get enough of his content.

Dovid’s glowing shout-out on Don’t Look Now, his own successful channel, sends Sam’s subscriber numbers skyrocketing overnight. He has more comments than he can read. And while the sudden surge in popularity is anxiety inducing, Sam decides it’s only right to dedicate his next episode to Dovid…which soon leads to a heart-pounding exchange of DMs.

They may have never met in person, but Dovid’s never felt this close to anyone before. What they have feels worth exploring—no matter the distance. But is it possible to already be in love with someone who’s half a world away?

Bio

Aidan Wayne lives with altogether too many houseplants on the seventh floor of an apartment building, and though the building has an elevator, Aidan refuses to acknowledge its existence. They’ve been in constant motion since before they were born (pity Aidan’s mom)—and being born didn’t change anything. When not moving Aidan is usually writing, so things tend to balance out. They mostly stick with contemporary romance (both adult and YA), but some soft sci-fi/fantasy has been known to sneak in as well, and they primarily write character-driven stories with happy endings. Because, dammit, queer people deserve happy endings too.