Hey ear-fans! Joel Leslie back with some narrator gab. (and, just to get your attention… a lack of narrator garb, LOL)

PEEK-A-BOOTH

I’m super excited this month to be chatting with two incredible writers, Christina Lee and Riley Hart and their enchanting collaboration, EVER AFTER, which I narrated and just released in audio!

Before we get to that fun stuff, I just wanna share the coolest thing that happened last week. My goddess, NR Walker and I were featured in an article in USA TODAY. Yup, US-freaking-A-holy-crap-TODAY! The headline was “5 Audiobooks To Appease Your Crazy Rich Asians Obsessions.” And WEIGHT OF IT ALL was listed right alongside Brigit Jones Diary and Cinder! The other titles were all mainstream, big names and NR’s fabulous m/m romance was right there along with them! It was incredible. And they said this about little old me… “Narrator Joel Leslie will have you missing your highway exit and frightening people on the train as you double over with laughter.” So. Yah. Wowwwwww. Me: Dead.

Ok – so now that we have that humble brag out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff…
I have been dying to work with Riley Hart for a long time. I love the way she interacts with her fan base, her covers are stellar (these things matter to narrators), and she always struck me as super cool. (All of this before I had even read a word of her writing… I just got a really good vibe). Christina and I had talked about working together on one of her books, but, sadly the timeline didn’t work out :(.

And then… along came this little cover posted on facebook and I lost my proverbial shit…

I think we can agree for a Disney Queen narrator who moved to Orlando to be closer to Mickey Mouse that this cover is CRACK. I was like GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME. It’s perfect. It’s gorgeous. I want these guys doing meet and greets at the Magic Kingdom and I want the tee shirt.

So I sent Riley a facebook message in December… Honestly I think this was before the book was even had a title. They had just shared the cover. Riley said they would keep me in mind, but then the book released (yay) and I didn’t hear anything (eep). And THEN one of my favorite bloggers (The Scarlet Siren) started messaging me and saying “you need to do this book” and I said “i know” and they harassing Riley and Christina and Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo… They asked me!

PS, Scarlet Siren is currently live-tweeting listening to this audiobook, and it’s HILARIOUS.

Anyway – so, I was thrilled. And now the book is out. And, despite biting all my nails and grinding my teeth in terror… Christina and Riley seem really happy. So, I thought I would ask them a little bit about their working relationship and how this lovely book came to life… Here’s the blurb BTW:

As next in line for the Evergreen crown, Prince Merrick Davendall’s future involves ruling, marriage, and producing an heir of his own. But he’s long been tormented by desires that are far from princely. Especially when the beautiful Cassius is promoted to be his new valet, and Merrick is struck by a longing like never before – a longing to know him far beyond royal and servant. 

After his father’s passing, Cassius Havendale’s sole duty is to provide for his family. A promotion to serve a pampered prince is something he endures only for their sake. Surely Prince Merrick has no understanding of the true suffering of the common people, nor could he possibly understand what it’s like to desperately desire something he cannot have. 

Except the prince is not at all what Cassius imagined. Kind, humorous, and caring to those in need, he also shares Cassius’s affinity for the arts. In fact, Merrick understands his deepest vulnerabilities in a most remarkable way. 

As their affection deepens, the underlying tension between them becomes unbearable and they’re unable to ignore it any longer. But when the queen prepares a lavish ball with all the eligible ladies in the land in attendance, Merrick must fulfill his obligations to his country, and Cassius has the needs of his family to consider. They’ve long known their stolen moments would have to come to an end, but are they ready to give up one another and the idea of a happily-ever-after? 

(AND just like they wrote the book, for this Q&A, they split the questions between them! Let’s start with Christina 🙂 )

JOEL:  How did you two first meet?

CHRISTINA:  So about five or six years back, Riley and I were both writing Young Adult and New Adult MF novels (her as Nyrae Dawn) and I was a fan of her books. In 2014, we had both written new adult MM romances through our respective publishers (mine was THERE YOU STAND through Penguin and hers was RUSH through Grand Central) and that was the point we really began communicating and connecting through social media. A few months later, I had done a blog interview where I was asked to name my favorite MM books and I mentioned Riley Hart and how much I loved her books. Nyrae emailed me and said, “I read your interview and guess what? I’m Riley Hart!” I was so stunned, I almost fell off my chair. It was pretty damned funny. We still laugh about it.

JOEL: When did you first discuss the idea of collaborating?

CHRISTINA: Back in 2015 Riley wrote a Facebook post about how she’d written a couple of MF collaborations with friends and I commented on her post saying how cool that was and that I always hoped to collaborate with an author friend someday. She messaged me and said something like, “Were you being serious?” And the rest is history. We wrote our first New Adult collab under her Nyrae Dawn name called Touch the Sky and went on to write five more books together under both of her names and become the best of friends.

JOEL:  That is such a cool story! I know that the genesis of EVER AFTER story started with the GORGEOUS cover… give me the dish!

CHRISTINA:  Riley and I both saw the premade cover on Jay Aheer’s Facebook and immediately messaged each other about purchasing it for a future book. We were in love! I always wanted to write a fairy tale and she was on board, even though we wouldn’t be able to get to it for another year. We tend to fall in love with similar images/things and it happened on another Jay Aheer cover as well. That book (called Of Sunlight and Stardust) releases this month. LOL!

JOEL:  It has to be tricky, not only starting with inspiration from an image, but with two different brains being inspired at once. So working from that illustration, how did you begin to develop the characters and choose which fairy tales would inspire you?

CHRISTINA: I had the idea for a Cinderella type story in my head for a while and told Riley about my vision. We went back and forth about the plot and characters for months before we even began writing it.

JOEL:  I think it’s a real treat, as the reader/listener journeys through the story to see elements from the cover pop up and think “ohhhh I see where that came from”! How did you decide to combine old and new elements in the world building? It feels very much like a Disney fantasy kingdom, but there are contemporary elements that work seamlessly as well.

CHRISTINA:  At some point, we decided that the actual cover illustration would only represent the one scene in the book, down to the clothing. And that was the ball scene. The rest of the book was written in an imaginary world with no named time period—though if we had to name one, it would be early 1900s, based on the clothing and speech, technology and/or lack thereof etc. Again, the land of Evergreen was purely born of our imagination, so it was fun to create the rules of that world and ask the readers to suspend disbelief enough that they could (hopefully) enjoy the story.

JOEL:  I thought the name “Evergreen” for a fairy tale kingdom was so perfect. And choosing to make it almost always winter was such a nice touch that comes to play in lovely ways throughout the story. How did you divide up the writing, tell me about about your collaboration process?

RILEY: We always each take a character. So for Ever After we knew the basic plot around a prince and his valet. From there we decided which character each of us was drawn to, and then we created our own backstory, personality traits, family/friends of our respective characters. We alternate chapters so I write the chapter in my character’s POV, including anything her character might say and do in those chapters, but she has ultimate veto power and I have it for my character. So if one of us has the other person’s character do or say something we fell they wouldn’t do or say, we can change it.

JOEL:  The writing feels so seamless, the blending of your two voices works beautifully. So, let’s talk audio. The minute I saw the cover of this book, I was dying to narrate it and was so excited when you got in touch. How do each of you decide the right voices for your books?

RILEY: I honestly don’t have a lot of experience in self-publishing my audio books and choosing the narrator. Most of mine are done through publishing houses, but I can say we knew your voice was right for this book from the start. We knew it would fit our characters and the world we’d created.

JOEL:  (Blushing!) So I always send my authors an infamous list of character questions… Tell me about your response to my character questions? I know they weren’t easy for you two in some ways lol. (Riley apparently doesn’t pay much attention to actors in tv or movies, so she hated having to come up with ‘casting’ suggestions).

RILEY:  Honest answer? Hahaha. It was a little scary. I’d definitely never thought of a patronus for my characters before, even though I feel like I know my characters SO well.

JOEL:  We ended up using British accents for the characters…  For me it helped create stronger delineation of the class divide between the two characters… emphasizing how different their worlds are.  How had you heard them in your head? Was that a big adjustment when you first listened? Were you pleased? What surprised you about hearing the book in audio?

RILEY:  I think I heard them with a British accent for sure, even though it IS an imagined world. It fit what I would describe as the very proper way they speak. I definitely loved hearing you bring it to life. It was magical!

CHRISTINA:  When I first listened to the sample you sent, I pretty much died. LOL! These characters were so special and vivid to me and I could picture Prince Merrick and Cassius in my head—though I wasn’t exactly sure how until you brought them to life. I knew their personalities and temperaments but hearing the actual words read aloud was a strangely surreal feeling. This book in particular because it was a made-up land in a Cinderella-esque story we’d created so that made it even seem even more dreamlike. Le sigh…they still make me swoon. So, thanks for taking such special care with them. It was worth the wait.

JOEL:  I was so nervous when I sent the initial sample. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking trying to please more than one author (since voices are a such a subjective thing and you have two different imaginations that have been hearing these characters in their imagination for months and months). And it was a project I had been terribly eager to record… so it was a lot of pressure!  I was soooo happy that we were on the same page with the accent choice. I’ve tackled some books in the past that the authors and I weren’t really in agreement with how to handle the fictional geography, and it was a real struggle.

JOEL:  Do you both listen to audio for pleasure?

RILEY: I just recently started listening to audio books. I had never given them a try until recently and I’m finding I love hearing certain stories brought to life that way.

AND NOW, BONUS QUESTION FOR RILEY

JOEL:  Riley, the week I started recording EVER AFTER, I was approached by Tantor about doing another one of your titles. Must have been Kismet – I’d been wanting to work with you for so long, and then BAM two came from two different directions! The Tantor title, which I just finished up, is HIS TRUTH. It knocked my socks off. (Whooooo, kids that book is sexy!!!!). It’s a sizzling second-chance romance and in a very different way it also deals with star-crossed differences in social status. How did that idea come to you?

RILEY: I actually did have the star-crossed theme in mind, their original names were actually Roman and Julian (like Romeo and Juliet).

JOEL:  No. Freaking. Way!

RILEY: I wanted to write people from totally different worlds and families that didn’t go along. This book took me to some dark places though. It’s very emotional and deals with tough subjects. I wrote 30k words of it in like, three weeks. Then I put it away and didn’t touch it for over six months. Summer 2016 I picked it up again, revised it, finished it, had it edited, then put it away and didn’t touch it again. LOL. I don’t know what scared me so much about this book. I revised it again, sent it to psychologists to read, revised again, re-edited it, and finally in 2018, I felt ready to let Leo and Roman into the world!

JOEL:  Well, thank you both so much for hanging out today and the great honor of recording for you both!

You can find out more about Riley here.  And Christina here.

And you can grab your copy of EVER AFTER in audio here!!

IN OTHER NEWS…

A book I’ve been dying for Tantor to release, NR Walker’s EVOLVED is out!

Toni Griffin’s cool and campy paranormal romance series about a yummy pack of Aussie Hellhounds begins with ARCHIE’S ACCIDENTAL KIDNAPPING.

In the world of non fiction, but of interest to LGBTQ peeps, I had the honor of recording  Brian Belovitch’s extraordinary memoir TRANSFIGURED for Brilliance Publishing.

And, considering that I’m the world’s biggest musical theatre spaz, recording ALL THAT JAZZ, a fascinating and dishy chronicle of the making of the musical CHICAGO, was a dream come true. It was written by one of the most Broadway’s most prolific historians, Ethan Mordden, who’s books have been on my shelves for years!!

So I have a copy of EVER AFTER to give away… So comment below and tell me which fairy tale you would most like to see get a gay makeover!

That’s it for now!
xoxoxo

Joel.
www.joelleslienarration.com