A Heartfelt Welcome to Normandie

Happy Valentine’s Day! Do they still make those little candy hearts with the sayings on them? I never got into those, even as a kid. Personally, I thought that candy should taste good no matter what. And, I didn’t like those hard-to-bite-into types. First of all, they weren’t made out of chocolate and we all know chocolate is the mainstay of the February 14^th celebration. I think it was the fourth grade where someone gave me a small Valentines (a card in the shape of a sports car saying “You’re my speed,” comes to mind) and glued some of those candy hearts on the front. Now how stupid was that? I couldn’t get the candy off the card!

Here in the South, Valentine’s Day is a pretty big deal. From the time I can remember, it was the major holiday precluding the dreaded St. Patrick’s Day – you know where you got pinched if you didn’t wear green. Except, I always wore green. Ugly Catholic School uniform. Oh, dear, I digress.

Today, I am honored to introduce to you my guest blogger and fellow author, Normandie Fischer. Normandie Fischer is a sailor who writes and a writer who sails. After studying sculpture in Italy, she returned to the States, graduated suma cum laude, and went to work in the publishing field, moving from proofreader up the ladder to senior editor, honing technical tomes, creative non-fiction, and, later, fiction. She and her husband spent a number of years on board their 50-foot ketch, Sea Venture, sailing from San Francisco to the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, and on through the Panama Canal. They moved home to coastal North Carolina to take care of her aging mother, where, as often as possible, she enjoys her two grown children and two grandchildren. She is the author of six novels.

AUDIOBOOKS AND ACCENTS by Normandie Fischer

People from Elsewhere talk about a Southern accent as if there were only one, and when they mention a drawl, they don’t mean Tennessee or North Carolina. They mean Alabama, maybe Georgia. But down here, we know the difference. Southern accents not only vary by state, they vary by region within each state, sometimes even by a square mile or two. They certainly vary by heritage, age, and wealth; by whether you’re citified, countrified, farm-bred, or mountain born. You’ll hear accents that have a drawl, a twang, are upbeat, downbeat, meandering, unintelligible, slow moving, silken, and sometimes rough.

I’m most familiar with North Carolina, although I spent some schooling days in the SC low country. But near my family’s coastal NC home, we have dozens of dialects and accents, including some rare ones that have elements of Elizabethan English left over from the isolation caused before bridges joined islands like Harkers to the mainland of Down East. The middle-state folk don’t sound much like the mountain-area born and bred, nor do they sound at all like the Downeasters—the folk who live east of the Atlantic Ocean coastline of Beaufort. (That still gets to me—if you’re already at the ocean, how can you keep driving east? You can because a lot of the coastline here actually faces south, and you just hook a left to go east.)

We who’ve lived down here and have generations of South behind us know the difference, and if we’re writers, we hear the differences in the voices we create. And I want to hear them in the audiobooks I listen to when I cook or clean, take a walk, pretend to exercise on the elliptical, or get behind the wheel of my car.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? When it came time to find a narrator for Heavy Weather, my second Carolina Coast novel, I listened to audition after audition, hoping to find one who could match even half the accents I’d imagined. I wanted to hear the softer, more educated voice of Hannah and Clay contrasted with Annie Mac’s more countrified voice and Roy’s angry, mean share-cropper’s accent. And then there were the children. And the housekeeper. And the town.

Tricky combinations, certainly. I knew the publisher of my debut novel, Becalmed, had given up and just found someone to read the book. I didn’t want that. I wanted Heavy Weather (and all my books) read by someone who’d capture my attention, who’d make me laugh and cry and rise up in fury at the bad guy’s antics. Who’d make me long for a happy ending. Who’d leave me with a satisfied sigh.

I don’t know how many narrators I listened to before Laura Jennings asked to audition. After listening to her audio sample in some awe, I sent it to my husband, my daughter. We agreed: we’d found the woman who could make the book come alive and make us believe. Now, Laura’s not a Southerner, but she has lived in Fayetteville, and she got what I said when I told her my characters were not Deep South. I told her I’d rather have no accent than the wrong one, and she got that, too. So, in some cases, we merely have hints at the dialect, but that’s good.

By the time she’d finished recording and then fixing all the niggling things this perfectionist author wanted tweaked, we had an audiobook that did all I’d wanted. I know the story intimately and yet I teared up at the sad bits and laughed at the funny ones because Laura made me believe. She’s that good. Which means, I hired her to record Twilight Christmas (the novella sequel to Heavy Weather), and she’s also going to be doing my next Carolina Coast novel.

The audiobook of Two from Isaac’s House needed slight Southern for two of the characters, but I was more concerned with the Italian and Arabic accents in that one. And Brandon Potter nailed those.

To celebrate the release of Heavy Weather in audiobook, I’m going to give one away to one person who comments here. I’ll also offer an ebook to someone else. Just let me know which you’d prefer and why.

Here’s what one reviewer had to say about the audiobook: 

“I loved that each chapter focused on a POV! The writer and the narrator made  a wonderful tandem of bringing to life the variety of characters. And what a story!”

“Everything I thought this story was about changed and then changed again. It was a thriller, a love story and a spiritual lesson rolled into a testament to a mother’s love. I loved it.”

“The narrator was incredible. She handled the scariest of personas I’ve ever listened to as well as the innocence of a 10-year-old boy and made you believe.”

You can find Normandie on the following:

Website: www.normandiefischer.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WritingOnBoard
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NormandieFischer/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Normandie-Fischer/e/B00BSIF2NI/

I want to thank Normandie for blogging today.  By the way, her novel, Heavy Weather, will be on sale for 99 cents at  Ereader News Today on February 16.

I’ll be back in two weeks with a look at a famous southern women who just happen to be an author.

Jody