Author: Lesley Ann Fogle

Hear No Evil January 2017

Hear No Evil January 2017

The biggest news is that we just released After-Death Plan’s album Literature which is a concept album about classic books and writers. Visit the site for a more info.

In audiobook news, 2017 begins with Rom Com, supernatural snark, YA espionage, and literary study.

I just finished my second Witch In Time audiobook for Amanda M. Lee’s popular, snarky Witchy Tales series. It is proofed and will go for second review this week. Just got T. A. MacLagan’s sleeper cell series They Call Me Alexandra Gastone back from proofing for minor revisions and that will go out this week as well. Next in line is my second audiobook Royally Wed in Pamela DuMond’s very funny Part-time Princess series. Her characters are stuck in my head and I look forward to hanging out with them again.

Then on to my fourth audiobook for Kimberly Krey (details soon after we announce).

Peppered in between the fiction reads, I’ll be keeping my voice relaxed but strong with the nonfiction narration of Carl Rollyson’s biography Understanding Susan Sontag through The University of South Carolina Press. In the simplest of terms, I am a big fan of Sontag’s work.

And that’s it for January and February audiobook mornings. I won’t get into commercial voice, field audio, or audio post work. Just retail projects that can be obtained.

We have most of the songs for After-Death Plan’s next album sketched out. I’ll be working on that quite a bit in my free time as well as a series of guided meditations. I teach regular yoga classes and my people are hooked on the guided meditations. As some classes came to term, I was asked to make a recording of the meditation rituals. I agreed and of course decided to do it right. Having recorded the vocal guides, I was just starting on the music when I lost my father in the fall. My energy was all over the place and not right for creating meditation music. So I decided to commission the very talented Lisa Bella Donna to write the music instead. She is a frighteningly prolific composer who embodies good energy. Those downloads will be available soon and I hope they bring peace and wonder to many.

Lesley Ann Fogle

January 5, 2017
Narrating The Annie Graceland Mysteries

I was recently talking (emailing) with Pamela DuMond, author of a very funny rom-com audiobook I narrated titled “Part-Time Princess, Ladies In Waiting: Book One.”

You know you have a good author/narrator relationship when you check in on each other regularly. She’s currently writing the sequel to Part-Time Princess which is exciting because it means we’ll be working together again and I get to live a bit longer in the heroine’s life. Hers is a very funny, feel-good ride.

In the meantime, Pamela has asked me to take over narrating The Annie Graceland Mysteries series. Here’s an excerpt from her blog:

“In HAPPY Audible Book News:

Lesley Fogle, the enormously talented narrator for Part-time Princess: A Romantic Comedy, will be taking over new Annie Graceland narrator duties. Lesley’s getting her feet wet with Cupcakes, Bats, and Scare-dy Cats. I can’t wait to share to her spin on this story with all of you… Hilarious!”

Home

I’ve read Pamela’s Messenger time-travel series but was not familiar with The Annie Graceland Mysteries series. I’m now taking a crash course in the previous books and prepping “Cupcakes, Bats, and Scare-dy Cats.” Here’s an overview of the series and Book 6:

The Annie Graceland Mysteries

Annie Graceland’s a baker with a pinch of psychic ability. She’s empathic; feels other people’s lusts, urges and desires in her own body. Usually it’s simple — someone’s craving chocolate, or lusting after the wrong guy. But since Annie discovered she can see and talk with ghosts, her life became a little more complicated…

Cupcakes, Bats, and Scare-dy Cats (AG, #6)

Annie Graceland has a pinch of psychic ability. It turns out her cat, Theodore, does too!
Cupcakes, Bats, and Scare-dy Cats is a hilarious, pet-friendly cozy mystery, told through the eyes of the cats, the dog, and Annie.

__________________________________________________________

Are you still there? Here are some audiobook review excerpts of “Part-time Princess” from wonderful listeners on Audible:

5 Stars! “Part-time Princess is a great entertainer” • “Pamela DuMond wrote a fun filled book and Lesley Ann Fogle’s narration only added to the awesomeness of it all.” • “A rollicking good time! PART- TIME PRINCESS: LADIES-IN-WAITING BOOK 1 is laugh out loud funny. Full of quirky characters that you will adore, this is a not to miss story. Lesley Ann Fogle does a fantastic job with the different voices and makes a great story a joyful experience to listen to.” • “Fun Fairytale Read!!! I absolutely loved the narrating by Lesley Ann Fogle, it turned a great book into a fun enjoyable story. This is such a refreshing entertaining book and I really enjoyed it so much I finished in one sitting. The characters are very well developed and likable, I really enjoyed Lucy she was fun. This is my first book by Pamela DeMond and it will not be my last, she is an amazing author.” • “5 Stars! Very Sweet!” • “This is a snort out loud funny book” • “Great job to the narrator” • “Lesley Ann Fogle’s narration of Part-time Princess is wonderfully appropriate. She has the lightness of voice to be appropriate to an adrift 20-something and invested Lucy with a wonderful personality. There were moments where it seemed the narrator was really enjoying the work and embodying the fish out of water, Lucy.”

March 8, 2016
Woman In Horror Interview

First off, let me say that I did not have the time to keep up with posts for many months. All of my free time went to my mom who was dealing with an onslaught of health issues. Since she passed away in November, I’ve spent a lot of time catching up with work, processing, and recovering my energy. Things are starting to normalize though everything has changed.

Now is a good time to get back into the swing of things. Or in this case, the gallow swing of things. February was Women in Horror month and David Spell of The Scary Reviews and Erin Sweet-Al Mehairi of Hook Of A Book Media were kind enough to include me in their spotlight interviews. I’m not an author but I have narrated quite a few books in the horror genre and I’m glad someone noticed. So far they’ve profiled 26 women with mini-interviews, so please visit thescaryreviews.com and read them all!

Here goes:

Woman In Horror Interview – Spotlight #9 by Scary Reviews

Lesley Ann Fogle, Narrator, Audio Specialist

How do you define horror and what drew you to it?

First movie I remember having an impact on me was “The Shining.” I covered my ears and figured out it was the sound that really gave me the creeps. I was sensitive to sound; if someone’s teeth were clacking or energy was directed at me then I would have would have to go somewhere isolated to read. But after that movie, I got my little hands on the book and the words made my mind listen intensely without any sensory interference. Horror helped me. Unsure why. Guess I’ll say effective horror makes my mind listen with impenetrable, macabre focus.

I think the next book to command my attention was “Wasp Factory.”

What sub-genre(s) do you read/narrate in?

So far I’ve narrated paranormal haunted house and classic ghost, supernatural crime thriller, classic sci-fi, mythological madness, and psychological Victorian paranormal. I put a lot into my audiobooks and get great responses from the authors.

What is your personal favorite part of reading horror?

I like dark prose and character meltdowns and humor. It’s mostly all entertaining to read. And sometimes alarming, in which case we’re learning. Personal favorite…Fred Godsmarck; he is the boss of horror audiobooks and a joy to work with which is rare/important in a publisher. Is there a word limit here? I also really enjoyed working on the Out-Of-Tune anthology; the short stories kept me on my toes and I like studying the writing style of many authors at once. Speaking of short stories, I recently narrated the promo trailer for the upcoming Borderlands Podcast Indiegogo campaign. Yes, THE Borderlands series! It’s coming soon so be on the lookout.

Lesley Anne Fogle Bio(hazard)

Within my harrowing 40-some years, I’ve studied opera, sound, engineering. Worked as a jingle singer, voiceover talent, location field mixer, and audio engineer for soul-sucking commercials (and cool films and shows and installations). I’m the Nintendo GameCube girl, Vena Gore from the underground band Mal VU, and singer/engineer for After-Death Plan whose upcoming 2016 album “Literature” holds songs inspired by books. I like to narrate books and record accents and mimic people and casually workshop my characters on the unsuspecting public.

TO READ MORE, please visit http://thescaryreviews.com/2016/03/04/women-in-horror-spotlight-9/

And again, check out the 25 other short interviews and get to know some authors in the industry:

Spotlight #1 author Chris Marrs, editor Sharon Lawson, author Sarah Read

Spotlight #2 authors Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, author Heather Herrman, author Suzi Albracht

Spotlight #3 author Fiona Dodwell, author Sara Brooke, author Lori R. Lopez

Spotlight #4 author Catherine Cavendish, author Stephanie M. Wytovich, author Kristin Dearborn

Spotlight #5 author Rena Mason, author Nikki Hopeman, author Sarah Dalton

Spotlight #6 author Lesley Conner, author Christie Stratos, author Andrea Zuvich

Spotlight #7 author Ania Ahlborn, author Rebecca Anne Pate, author Elena Hearty

Spotlight #8 author Sephera Giron, author Monica O’Rourke, author Latashia Figueroa

Spotlight #9 narrator Lesley Ann Fogle, author Carol Davis

Women in Horror Spotlight #1

March 8, 2016
Doppelgänger by Sean Munger released on Audio Realms

Doppelgänger by Sean Munger released on Audio Realms! It should be up at Audible in the next few days as well.

It’s a Victorian horror story about a newlywed named Anine Atherton who moves from Sweden to her lavish new home in New York. But from her first terrifying impression of the house, Anine is haunted by strange events and an angry entity that uses the guilty thoughts and memories of others to get exactly what is wants. (see a longer synopsis below)

I enjoyed narrating this book. Sean Munger has an intelligence to his writing that kept me on my toes. While prepping the material I ran across what I thought were Ingrid Bergman references so I let her inspire the lighter accent for the main character, Anine Atherton. I revisited the movies Gaslight, Spellbound, and Notorious over the course of the book. The other characters were strongly written as well and so their inflections came easily, which is great because narrators typically get about a day with a book before it is time to move forward and record. The most challenging scene involved a seance. Dr Dorr, a professor and medium, who himself spoke with a strange high-pitched voice that was both squeaky and sing-songy, channeled the doppelgänger who spoke through him with much exertion and with the tinny voice of a trumpet. I remember narrating these descriptions and thinking, “Oh boy, how am I going to do this?” and “Stay calm but get ready to back up from the mic and give it your best high-pitchedsqueakysingymalechannelingevilentity.” Ha! Oh, and remember not to turn into a cartoon or a close-up. Good times.

I put a lot of effort into my audiobooks and love getting feedback from authors. So it was a treat that Sean Munger had some really nice things to say. Thanks, Sean!

“Audio Realms chose veteran voice talent Lesley Ann Fogle to do the narration, and it was absolutely the right choice. (Here’s Lesley’s website). Her sonorous voice totally draws you into the story and she made it sound so new and surprising that I forgot I had written the words she was reading. Ms. Fogle did an especially good job with the voices of the various characters. They really come to life in an amazing way. Anine Atherton, the novel’s heroine, is Swedish, and in addition to her quotations there are a lot of Swedish words and expressions in the narrative, and Lesley handled them perfectly. Her characterization of Miss Wicks, an important supporting character in the book, was so absolutely perfect that she sounded exactly like I imagined the character would sound. I also loved her characterization of Julian, the novel’s chief villain. Overall it was like hearing a radio play–much more than just dull droning narration!”

Read more here.

______________________________________

Synopsis:

Transplanted from her native Sweden to the drawing rooms and gas-lit parlors of Gilded Age New York, Anine Atherton will want for nothing in the lavish row house her rich new husband bought for her. But Anine’s house doesn’t seem to like people. The caretaker hangs himself in the entryway. The maid drops dead her first day on the job. Anine herself is becoming anxious and terrified, and not just because of the ghostly laughter she hears in the middle of the night. Her gentle, charming husband is slowly turning into a domineering brute. And whatever shadowy entity lives in her house, it can read Anine’s mind and use her darkest secrets against her. The last woman to live in the house went insane. Will Anine be next in line?

——–

November 28, 2015
Vocal Warmup Techniques For Audiobook Narrators

You have to warm up your voice. Do not skip it! I warm up for at least 30 minutes on narration days. I start with moving the body: head and shoulder rolls, wrist and arm circles (I gesture a lot with fiction), side bends and reaches that get the rib cage moving. I’ll address breathing exercises in a future blog post, but they are a critical part of the warm up process.

From there, I might move on to lip trills and tongue trills (at the roof of the mouth, then with the tip of the tongue at the teeth, then again with the tongue sticking out). Add humming to those trill drills. Remove your mask by moving every muscle in the face, blow out your cheeks, trace your teeth with your tongue, gargle, lift and stretch the soft palate, strike a lion face (From yoga’s lion pose. I highly recommend starting a yoga practice and learning Alexander Technique; these have been crucial tools of mine for work and play for the past twenty years. Will write about the benefits of both in future posts as well).

After trills and face exercises, I might move through the vowels seamlessly; then again with various inflections (Statement. Question? Adamant question?! Demand!). Then I might move to consonants, listening to projection points for each. To keep the humors going, I like to make up tongue twisters on the fly using names of friends. Here are a few:

Bob bid Bilbo Baggins: Build the badlands!

Quit quick kisses, Costa. Kick quick kiss quips!

Mikhael must murmur misfits. Mantic Matt must murder mold. Meal milk meek meat.

Narrow noodles neurally nauseate Nikki. Nikki needed unique new innumerable noodles.

Punk Patrick probably purposely punctuated pit-pat-polly-pack.

Suzie said she’d surely stay sleeping, slumbering on the sloping slide of somnambulistic sleep.

My tongue twisters change according to need. One of the most important things I do is to find and work on my weaknesses. I copy and paste sentences I stumble over into a list. Here’s one from last week:

Daniel was feeling agitated that the detective kept ignoring his questions.

I practice that list of stumblers to identify transitions that are tricky for me, working those sound transitions into tongue twister exercises or drills until they are no longer a problem. “That the detective” made it into my list of drills for agility, keeping the tip of the tongue forward behind the two front teeth. Some twisters stick around; for years I have used this odd little gem to correct my sibilance issues: The wrists, they twist like cysts in the mist. I’d just needed to move my “s” sounds back a bit – though that little insight took time to master. Ironing out weaknesses is an important exercise for me in maintaining a sharp reading pace during hours of cold reading audiobooks. It would be easier to slow down to read ahead but I personally can’t listen to slow audiobook reads. If I can think thoughts in between a narrator’s words, then the read is too slow.

On to relaxing the throat. I try to keep a very open and relaxed throat during a session (insert joke here). This is very similar to the space in the back of the throat created when singing opera or using ujjayi breath in yoga. It is the “ha” position often described as holding an egg in the back of the mouth or fogging up a mirror. There are words you can drill with to work on the position of an open throat for the sake of practice. I make up my own amusing drills to keep the humors going: THE THICK FAT BAT SHAT DARK DRAB CRAP. HA, HA, HA. Say this five times: THE THICK FAT BAT SHAT DARK DRAB CRAP, HA, HA, HA.

If that doesn’t make you smile then I cannot help you. Try Googling “humorless drills.”

Lastly, I always warm up character voices. Locking in and shifting voices is a strong point of mine and there’s a lot to say about it on another day. I need to get back to work.

Warmly, Lesley Ann Fogle

p.s. I haven’t been on Twitter long and would like to connect with people who might be interested in this topic or have things to say that might help unlock more insights into the voice: @LesleyAnnFogle

And if your name starts with an X or Z, I’ll write you a twister.

Lesley Ann Fogle is a Narrator, Voice Artist, and Audio Designer. Visit her website at www.hearnoevil.us

June 25, 2015
My audiobooks are on the inside cover of Publisher’s Weekly!

It’s Audiobook Month and this is the inside front cover of the June 2015 issue of Publisher’s Weekly.

Publisher’s Weekly inside cover featuring Audio Realms and Samhain Publishing

Three of these are my books! Well, not my books, but I became very close to them during the narration process for Audio Realms. They are the brain children of several of the talented horror writers at Samhain Publishing: Stillwater by Maynard Sims, Doppelgänger by Sean Munger, and Boomtown by Glenn Rolfe. I’ll send out some notes and tweets and spasms as each is released. In the meantime, here are some sneak peek snippets of each:

Stillwater by Maynard Sims, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date July 2015

A modern ghost story.

Life was good for Beth, once. Now a car crash has left her confined to a wheelchair. To help her recuperate and rebuild her life, she’s leased Stillwater, a house with a lake in the countryside. But her dreams of peace and quiet are thwarted when she realizes she’s not alone. A girl who once lived at Stillwater—until she drowned in the lake—has never left, and she does not seem pleased by Beth’s presence. Beth sets out to solve the mystery of Stillwater. But can she find a strength she doesn’t know she possesses as she fights the fury of the dead girl, and tries to establish herself as the true mistress and keeper of the Stillwater house and lake?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/198635129″]
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Doppelgänger by Sean Munger, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date July 2015

The house of madness!

Transplanted from her native Sweden to the drawing rooms and gas-lit parlors of Gilded Age New York, Anine Atherton will want for nothing in the lavish row house her rich new husband bought for her. But Anine’s house doesn’t seem to like people. The caretaker hangs himself in the entryway. The maid drops dead her first day on the job. Anine herself is becoming anxious and terrified, and not just because of the ghostly laughter she hears in the middle of the night. Her gentle, charming husband is slowly turning into a domineering brute. And whatever shadowy entity lives in her house, it can read Anine’s mind and use her darkest secrets against her. The last woman to live in the house went insane. Will Anine be next in line?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/207513345″]
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Boomtown by Glenn Rolfe, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date June 2015

Terror from below!

In the summer of 1979, Eckert, Wisconsin, was the sight of the most unique UFO encounter in history. A young couple observed a saucer-like aircraft hovering over Hollers Hill. A blue beam blasted down from the center of the craft into the hill and caused the ground to rumble for miles.

Now, thirty years later, Eckert is experiencing nightly rumbles that stir up wild rumors and garner outside attention. The earthly tremors are being blamed on everything from earthquakes to underground earth dwellers. Two pre-teens discover a pipe out behind Packard’s Flea Market uprooted by the “booms” and come into contact with the powerful ooze bubbling from within. What begins as curiosity will end in an afternoon of unbridled terror for the entire town.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/209861194″]

June 11, 2015
New Website!

Welcome to my new website! Special thanks to the talented Aaron Yeagle of Author Platform Guru for his, well, guru skills. And thanks to Constantine Hondroulis for his management skills.

Highlights this week include wearing scrubs for a medical training shoot, eyeing the finish line on my current audiobook, and making it through week three of the plank challenge.

The medical training videos were shot here in Columbus on multiple Red cameras by owner/operators Lance Meaux and Chris Hagan (DP). They both do beautiful work and are a lot of fun on the set. Worked with Chris Carson (AC, PA) for the first time and was very impressed by how he made himself indispensable on the set and did so with relaxed ease. I was field mixer, using the Sound Devices 664 mixer/recorder: great sounding pres, ample routing options, and an internal recorder that can be set to record polyphonic WAV files to CF and SD cards. I love that option because for 50 camera takes, each involving 6 channels (5 lavs and a backup boom), you have 50 WAV files that each contain 6 tracks when imported into ProTools or Final Cut. You don’t have to handle 300 tracks. The editor can solo say the boom track as scratch, make the other 5 tracks inactive, and group/lock those 6 tracks per take for the edit. Then your post engineer knows everything there is to work with when they get the OMF back. I’ll blog about using all of the tracks to cut the best final audio when we get to the post-production stage of that project. This is where you want a post audio engineer with experienced ears as you can’t just set up an EQ on a channel and expect that to be the right filter on a moving target. I’m sure this process sounds obvious to my audio engineer friends, but I think video folk will get something out of it. To my voice talent friends, the producer hooked me UP on that shoot and I will also be narrating the medical training videos!

I am two chapters away from finishing the narration for Windwood Farm (Taryn’s Camera, Book 1) by Rebecca Howard-Patrick. The series focuses on Taryn Magill, an artist/photographer who uses her oil-painting skills and her degrees in Art and Historical Preservation to create portraits of grand buildings as they would have been when they were created, long before they fell into disrepair. Further, Taryn uses determination and her burgeoning psychic abilities along with her camera’s burgeoning ability to develop actual pictures of the past to solve the mysteries behind the paranormal encounters she experiences while on the job. I love this book. It ties into many things I value: historic preservation, the paranormal, the American gothic vibe. My first engineering experiences in my teens involved gathering EVP recordings…this was in the late 80s, pre-internet, before I could discover what the masses knew about EVP. Ok, and I love historic houses. My husband and I painstakingly restored our Craftsman-style house to life in Columbus’ first, historic neighborhood. We geek out on the researching the history and treat our house like family. In other words, I love the subject; and when I looked over the script for Windwood Farm and read about Taryn’s connection and even conversation with these grand old inanimate objects, I was hooked. Taryn herself gets so immersed in her work that she can come off as aloof and she has a healthy sense of sarcasm to boot.

Finally, the plank challenge. See this?

Rug burn. I’ve been taking my yoga and core classes through the plank challenge for the past few weeks. This week we got up to the five 35 second sets of walking planks which I’ve also seen called alternating hand planks…the ones where you go back and forth from a high pushup to a forearm plank. I feel like I could pop on a crazy German guard bra right now and it would feel comforting. Everything from my neck to lower rib cage hurts; the pain goes away for a second then picks back up from belly button to hip joint. The stuff below that feels great and so does my head. I don’t know about Week 4 because it involves Spiderman kookery. I’m also the only one that got rug burn.

June 8, 2015