A New Narrator

The novels in the Idioms & Cliches series have been a challenge to produce in Audible because of several reasons. For one thing, although they are all connected within the same family, each book is about a different generation with none of the characters appearing from the previous book, even though some of the previous characters are mentioned. The only exception to this is when Robbie in A Few Bumps in the Road becomes Robert in Got Your Goat. However, he is a child in the first book and a man in the next. It's always bothered me when a series moves to another book, and the voice of the main characters in the first is now the voice of different main characters. Therefore, I wanted different narrators for each of these books.

Then, for three of the books, I needed someone who could not only pull off an Appalachian Mountain dialect but also do a general American one. I wasn't able to find anyone with an Appalachian background, but James Cheatham who narrated Going the Extra Mile lived in the South until he was a teenager and was familiar with the accent. Douglas Birk and Jennifer Groberg produced Got Your Goat. Doug is from Missouri, a state that has some mountains and "hillbillies" of its own, and Jennifer lived in North Carolina for a while and does a good Southern drawl.

That brings us to the last book in the series, Taking Stock. It needed someone who could do a D.C. general American accent and an Appalachian one, so I went looking. Because there are so many varied voices in this one, I had hoped to find a dual team, but none I contacted responded. In fact, I didn't hear anything from most of the twenty-six I reached out to, and only five sent in auditions. Jared Walter's audition stood out from the rest, and he accepted the contract.

I'm very excited to be working with Jared. He's from western Tennessee and has a smooth voice that I could listen to all day. He's also handling the variety of voices like the professional he is. Although no male is going to read a script exactly like a female, he does as good a job as anyone I've ever heard. I expect you'll be hearing more from him in my Audibles because he would be great for one or more of the four westerns I have coming out between now and the end of the year.

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