Hello Byters

It’s Joel Leslie again. I’m late this month! Forgive me?

Well, first off, I’ve had a pretty memorable week. Out of nowhere the elves at Audible decided to make Cronin’s Key the Audible Daily Deal. A gazillion people apparently one clicked that sucker and NR Walker and I found ourselves with the Number 1 selling title on ALLL OF AUDIBLE. It was cray cray. It was beyond incredible that an LGBT title managed to hit that spot.

Of course…with people one-clicking it, both NR and I both braced ourselves for some folks realizing a little late they had just bought a book with two dudes kissing. (No, of COURSE they didn’t read the blurb, OR the fact that it was in the Gay and Lesbian category, silly goose lol). So, we are in for a string of one star reviews by people traumatized by M/M! Some of the reviews are kind of hilarious…

“Christians Beware! Man on man action. Don’t listen to this if you have Christian beliefs. just saying.”

“Gay Romance be aware!”

“How can you take a book that seems like it would be really interesting and ruin it? Litter it with F-bombs. When authors do that, it is offensive to me. I couldn’t make it through the 1st chapter! It certainly doesn’t add to the story line in any way! It’s a crutch! Learn to tell a story without them! Please!”

And my favorite…

“Not my cup of tea, but if you enjoy homosexuality it may be yours.”

Luckily NR has a sense of humor, and I’m darn excited that a bunch of new readers will discover her incredible writing. And, tip of the hat to Audible for making an LGBT title a Daily Deal in Pride Month. And despite the unsuspecting folks who now have m/m romance PTSD, the book now has 418 five-star reviews 🙂

So that was my fifteen minutes of Audible fame lol.

I also went to the Audie Awards in NY (which are the audiobook version of the Oscars), and one of my highlights was getting to hang out with my personal book crush – the brilliant narrator Michael Crouch. He is the FANTASTIC narrator of the audio of Simon and Homo Sapien Agenda (that was the basis of Love, Simon). He’s sooooo good y’all…

ANYHOOOOOOOO…

This month I thought we could talk about a few things that make a narrator love a writer. Little examples of these come up all the time and when an author actually does them (probably without it even being conscious) it makes my job so much easier!

Often this stuff has to do with allowing the 3^rd person narrative to discover, process and mention information at the same time as the reader would. Now I should mention that NONE of these things makes the writing any better or worse, and none of it prevents a narrator from having to do their prep and read the book before they start recording. Here’s why it really matters – when narrators do our prep, we are figuring things out – our wheels are turning – as we read, from page one. We are trying to hear the characters out loud in our imagination from the very start. So if we get to page 80 and we suddenly learn significant new info out of the blue it means we not only have to rethink but also, we haven’t been imagining the dialogue in the correct voice in all the pages up until that moment. I think it’s the same for a reader… if you’ve let them build a character in their imagination and then throw in something totally new once we’ve already created that person in our mind, it can be jarring. The reader wants that information up front as much as I do. They are imagining a movie in their head, and if they have spent half the book conjuring a character in their imagination then why pull the rug out from under them?

Here’s some other fun stuff that comes up a lot…

• Forget Carmen Sandiego… Where in the world is this book set?
  You would be amazed how many books that I have to audition for that give you no sense of where we are geographically early on in the book. (And, usually when I’m doing an audition all I can see is the first chapter in the Amazon preview). And sometimes the book never says. I think some authors like their characters to live in an everyman world where the reader can always imagine it relates to them. Makes sense. But knowing if I’m in Nebraska or London in the first 50 pages of a book is a big help. There are authors who write books set in both the UK and the US or the US and Australia and sometimes I have to get a whole bunch of pages in to figure out on which continent one of their particular books is set! I’m not saying the first line of the book needs to be “What a nice day here in sunny Canadian Saskatchewan in August”… but it makes me super super happy when in the first 10 pages I what music I’m listening for. I think one of the reasons I love doing historical novels and regency romance is they almost always start with a big old header in Italics that says something like…  ~ LONDON, JANUARY 1842 ~Not only do I know I’m English in this book, I also know to pack a sweater! LOL.

• The Baritone Blindside: Suddenly describing the characters voice 3/4 through the story.
  This is the narrator equivalent of a 70’s Disaster movie. Because in a 300 page book, there might be ONE reference to a character’s ‘deep growly voice’ on page 254. Of course, we are reading the book beforehand, but if there is that one little reference casually dropped in the midde, it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking out for it. And then you’ve prepped your book and feel like you’ve done your homework and you’re on the 26^th hour of recording and suddenly you’re screwed (and not in a fun ‘Christians Beware’ kind of way). It actually just happened to me this week. I had prepped a book, and in their character descriptions for me the author had said they saw the character as a kind of Ryan Reynolds type… kind of boisterous and wild. This character was one of six other ‘tough guy’ type characters in a gang so I had to create a lot of vocal variations. Ryan Reynolds has a pretty high voice… he’s definitely a tenor. And I loved the way he was developing as I was working through the book. Then, I was on chapter five and there was a passing reference to his ‘low voice’ and it was like pulling a thread on a sweater.I am currently recording an AMAZING, gothic, British Y/A novel for Harper Audio. I’m obsessed with it. And, guess what? On page 50 there is ONE, SINGLE, TINYYYYY reference to the fact that one of the two main characters is ‘from the North’. Which COMPLETELY changes her accent from alllll the other characters who are from Cornwall. If I didn’t do my homework I would have been screweddddddd.There are a lot of reasons I love Kim Fielding…but one of them is that she tells you about a character’s voice when it makes sense. The FIRST time they speak! (No wayyyy?? Way!)  I just recorded THE BUREAU for her (which is amazing)… But in one of those stories a particular character says their very first line of dialogue and that line is immediately followed by: “Sam had a deep voice, very odd and rumbly for his small frame”. Yaaaaaazzzz!!!  Jordan Castillo Price did it too in IMPERFECT MATCH which I just finished recording… On page two she says “If Roman’s lyrical drawl hadn’t been a dead giveaway as to where he lived, his use of the term Boomer certainly would have.” Now the reader can imagine the voice through the whole book. Yay!!!!

• Growing Pains: How old are the kids?
  Ok – here is a weird one. For some reason you would be amazed how often people will write children into a book and not give them any indication of age. A ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ will appear and we will have no idea how old they are supposed to be. It STRESSES ME OUT lol. This is another one where very often the information will be buried somewhere in the book. On page 287 someone will say “Well, Susie now that you’re almost 5…”  And I will cry, because I’ve been prepping the whole book, reading the dialogue in my head imagining they were 11.

• Too Much (Edvard) Munch: So much screaming.
  I have an author I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, but one of their favorite things to do is write “he screamed” or “she screamed” as a dialogue tag. A lot. And it’s not a fun day at the office. There is a reason people who do voices for violent video games get paid really, really good money… because they blow their voices out screaming. Yelling is actually different and not so hard to stimulate in narration. You can kind of suggest yelling by putting a lot of air behind the vocalization and acting like you’re really pissed off at someone in the middle of a library. But a SCREAMED line of dialogue is something different all together – it implies a different pitch level and vocal tightness and strain… and when it happens a lot, starting on page one, it can really reduce your recording stamina considerably. So, if you can avoid it, wonderful wordsmiths, be sparing with the screaming.
• Once you go black.
  I once did a book where there was only one passing, itsby bitsy, tiny reference to the fact that a character was African American in the second to last chapter. It wouldn’t have been a big deal except the character also had a really SASSY mother. And there was NO WAY a sassy, mouthy Southern white mother sounds the same as a sassy, mouthy Southern black mother. I had recorded her as Dixie Carter and it should hbe been Neicy Nash. There was nothing to do but go back and re-record every one of their lines. And, yup, it was my bad. I should have seen the reference.

• Make it a double.
  This one that has tripped me up a couple times because it’s so easy to miss when you do a pre-read. I can be recording a whole chapter like a rock star and then suddenly there will be tiny little line that says “now the wine was starting to get to me” and I realize I was supposed to be building up to being tipsy and I’ll need to double back and slur some stuff. Most of the time I catch it and I’ll chart it by a scale of 1-10 of drunkenness as the scene progresses by making a numerical notation in the margin.

Special Bonus Panic Attack…

• The dreaded mystery voice. This usually happens in suspense or mystery books. The 3^rd person or 1^st person narrator will describe a phone call from the bad guy/gal but we aren’t supposed to know who they are yet. This works great on the page. But if you later discover that the villain making that phone call was the 84 year old Russian diplomat, it’s gonna be really hard when you do the audio to figure a way to record that phone call without giving away the whole mystery. Sometimes you just have to cheat, and we usually end up whispering the lines or pretending like someone is rasping the lines to disguise who they are. There isn’t much an author can do about this one, unless they are thinking about the transfer to audio as they write. But hopefully everyone will forgive us a little artistic license if we have to fudge stuff.

Anyway – like I said, none of these things make a book better or worse and has no impact on the quality of the writing or how much I love the story. They are just little things that, as a narrator and a reader, I’ve learned to appreciate when I see them!

Now, every time you read a book, you’re gonna be going “Where the heck are we?”, aren’t ya? Sorry/not sorry 🙂

New Releases!

WITH A KICK Collection No. 1 by Clare London.

Two books by Aimee Nicole Walker, produced by Tantor Audio came out this month:

UNSCRIPTED LOVE 

SOMEONE TO CALL MY OWN

Both are part of her fab Road to Blissville series.

The delicious BRANDON MILLS VS THE V CARD by Lisa Henry and JA Rock.

and YANNI’S STORY, the companion to NR Walker’s amazing  Spencer Cohen series is out too!

Plus fun titles from Kim Fielding and Jordan Castillo Price should also be out before we have our next chat, so keep your eyes peeled!

And, it’s now tradition… you deserve a saucy shirtless pic that makes my Mom phone my husband and complain about ruining a perfectly nice blog with my nipples…

Are we facebook friends or twitter buddies? Why not!!!!

I love seeing your comments below. Next month I’m gonna be chatting with Jordan Castillo Price, so if you have any questions for us, lemme know!

xo

JoJo.