L.A. Meyer has been a listener for years. Meyer, a visual artist before he turned to writing, spent hours framing prints of his work in his Bar Harbor, Maine Studio. He found those were great listening times as "you don't have to think much when you're framing."
In fact, the idea for his popular YA series came from a listening experience. One day while framing, he tuned into his local independent radio station. They were playing a string of folk songs about girls dressing up to follow their lovers to war, or sea. as a boy and goes to war, or sea. He thought to himself, "Wouldn't it be great to have a girl who goes off to sea, not to follow a boyfriend, but because she needs to eat?" The result was his feisty female character, Jacky Faber, who disguises herself as a ship's boy, fleeing the poverty and hunger of London streets to get "three squares" on the navy ship HMS Dolphin. Jacky's fourth book will be coming out this summer and the first, "Bloody Jack" has just come out in audio.
Meyer listened to many audio stories in those studio hours and he still listens when he travels, or when hours of writing make him print weary. "I thought Frank Muller from Recorded Books was an excellent reader." He's a fan of mysteries by writers like James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard and Stuart Woods. And "listening to David McCullough's "John Adams" gave me lots of material for my books".
Part of the success of his character, Jacky, comes from the immediacy brought about by Meyer's writing in first person. But Meyer's wonderful ear for the voice of his female character, with her strong Cockney accent, does much to create the story's mood and setting as well as incredible visual images. At the beginning of his creative process, Meyer's writing is informed by listening. Once he comes up with a character idea, he's helped by thinking of "an actor to wrap the character" around. "I took the voice of the captain of the HMS Dolphin straight from John Kleese's "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". He thought of "To Kill a Mockingbird"'s Scout when he imagined Jacky. They are clearly different in accent, Jacky's voice Cockney rather than Southern, but their emotional responses are quite similar.
When "Bloody Jack" came out, Meyer listened to it once "and then I listened to it again!" At first it was strange to hear his written words spoken aloud, but the voice was very close to what he'd imagined. "Kellgren emotes more than the usual reader," he comments and this seems a perfect match for feeling-driven Jacky Faber who can fly from fear to kindness in moments.
Did he have any surprises when he listened to the audio? He had a a pleasant surprise in hearing how well Katherine Kellgren read through the accents. "I didn't realize how difficult this was until I had to do a reading in Portland. I found the accent incredibly difficult to read aloud, so when I heard Kellgren's reading, I was completely enthralled!" He'd love to hear her read Kellgren of his books, marking the accent chages as Jacky's strong Cockney become genteel as she's educated. But in these books crammed with adventure, Meyer says, "the Cockney often comes back when Jacky is excited, frightened, or scared and that happens often."