Travis Baldree's narration career is his writing superpower

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Sam Danis: Hi, I'm Sam, Audible's Sci-fi & Fantasy Editor, and I am delighted to be interviewing award-winning narrator and now Hugo nominated author, Travis Baldree. You may recognize his voice from Will Wight's Cradle series, as well as many, many other titles, particularly in the progression fantasy and LitRPG genres. But, of course, you'll now also recognize his name and voice from his debut novel, Legends & Lattes, and its sequel, Bookshops & Bonedust

Travis, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Travis Baldree: Thank you so much for having me here.

SD: So, I'm really excited about the upcoming book. Bookshops & Bonedust, that rather than being a direct sequel to Legends & Lattes, actually takes us back to Viv's earliest adventuring days, and, in particular, another somewhat quiet moment in her life as she recovers from a battle injury in the seaside hamlet of Murk. What compelled you to dive deeper into this character and go back to, kind of, her origins?

TB: Well, it definitely wasn't my original intention. In fact, Bookshops & Bonedust is, I believe, my fourth restart of the second book.

SD: Wow.

TB: I was convinced I knew what I was going to write after Legends & Lattes. In fact, when Tor acquired it, I told them in great detail about that book, which was a basic ... it'd probably be summed up as a fantasy Murder, She Wrote.

SD: (laughs)

TB: And I made it about 30,000 words into that book before I decided that I hated it, and that I'm not a mystery writer at all. It turns out that I can't really do Agatha Christie. I'm probably a little bit more Scooby Doo.

So, in complete terror, I started over—after letting my editors at Tor know—and it took me a few more rounds before I discovered what I actually wanted to write about and that I was going to go back and visit Viv again. And there was just a moment where it clicked, and it became apparent that I had something to say, and that I knew I wanted to talk about something specific. Then, I was actually able to sit down and write the book.

SD: That's awesome. And, yeah, the story gets a little bit into how she started off adventuring, some of her earliest relationships that led her to start to discover who she was. And in kind of the same fashion as Legends & Lattes, which was a love letter to coffee shops in a way, (laughs) Bookshops is really a love letter to just that—the beloved local bookstore. There are even some very fun passages from some in the universe novels, some spicy sea fae romance.

There is, of course, some conflict in this book. I think there's a little bit of an element of mystery to it as well, so I think it's interesting that was, kind of, the first iteration of this story—but in this one, it's in the form of a necromancer who has Murk in her crosshairs. But once again, the story is first and foremost about these characters and their relationships to the people they love and the things that they love.

It feels like cozy fantasy is just all the rage right now. I'm curious, why you think that is and what's appealing for you about writing and listening to stories in that genre?

TB: I think that cozy fantasy has existed for a long while in a lot of different permutations from Terry Pratchett to things like Howl's Moving Castle and every Studio Ghibli movie ever made.

SD: Yup.

TB: But I think that people are looking for cozy fantasy for the same reason that I felt like I wanted to write it, which was in the deepest, darkest heart of COVID. Our in-person connections to each other were really thin on the ground—they still kind of are. You know, I don't feel in a lot of ways that we've recovered from that period.

SD: For sure.

TB: Moments when we would go out—we're just so used to staying at home and being kind of sequestered. So, I missed seeing people, and I wanted to feel okay. It felt like the world was hanging fire all the time, and I didn't want a red wedding or a massive betrayal or for my beloved characters to all die. I wanted things to be okay.

I was watching The Great British Bake Off; I was watching Fixer Upper. These were the things that I wanted. This was the level of comfort that I felt I needed. And I think a lot of other people just turned out to need the same thing at roughly the same time.

SD: Yeah ... And we're both kind of sequestered (laughs) in our own homes talking to each other right now.

TB: I know, right now.

SD: (laughs) So clearly, things have not entirely returned to normal. Yeah, I think that's so interesting. The biggest stakes in these novels, which are kind of pitched as low-stakes fantasy, is this feeling of belonging and community, for Viv especially.

TB: Mm-hmm.

SD: Will this work out? Will this life she's trying to build work out for her? And I think that's something we can all relate to.

TB: The weird thing that there are … You know, I pitch it as low stakes, but honestly, they're high stakes on a personal level.

All this stuff is high stakes—it’s just not big-scale stakes is really what it kind of amounts to. And I'm okay with that; I'm okay with that. It's nice to have stakes that don't involve whether you're going to survive or not.

When I set out to write Legends & Lattes, what I wanted to do was write in the genre that I love—fantasy. I read a lot of it, but I wanted to do something where all of the little acts of bravery that the characters show have nothing to do with killing anything. (laughs)

"It's nice to have stakes that don't involve whether you're going to survive or not...Your ultimate relationship with the best friend that you found—Is there higher stakes that you can have as a person? I don't know."

Everything from switching to a new town and switching careers, trusting people where you didn't trust them before, and then, ultimately, testing and finding out whether a really strong friendship is maybe something more. And, you know ... All of those are really high stakes. Your ultimate relationship with the best friend that you found—Is there higher stakes that you can have as a person? I don't know.

SD: Definitely. Yeah, those are the highest stakes that we as humans go through, and why not orcs and dwarves?

So, switching gears a little bit to your narration career. I'm curious, how'd you get started as a narrator and, in particular, what led you to almost specialize in the genre of fantasy?

TB: I initially narrated as a hobby. I don't have an acting background. I was not a theater kid, so if (laughs) if you told anybody that I grew up with that I would have been doing this, they would have said you were insane because it just didn't really match me at all. But I really did enjoy reading to my children. I read to my wife for years and years, and I liked it. And I really liked audiobooks. Frank Muller's still my favorite narrator of all time.

I stumbled across ACX—I was still a game developer at the time; I made video games for a couple of decades—and I put together the equipment to do a home studio recording, so I didn't have to rent studio space. So, I had the equipment and I found ACX, which for those who don't know, is a service that Amazon Audible runs that facilitates publishing audio between indie authors and publishers to actually get their audiobooks created.

And it turned out that I liked it, and I was pretty good at it. So, I did it on the side for years. And I did not expect that I would be doing—certainly not LitRPG or progression fantasy or the things that I'm known for. I thought I would be doing mystery novels and thrillers and stuff, because I thought that's what my voice lent itself to. And I did some early on, and I'm sure that the tipping point for me was probably Will Wight's Cradle series, which is very well known at this point.

SD: Yup. (laughs) And beloved.

TB: It’s fabulous, and it's incredibly fun to do, and I feel fortunate every day that I got to do it. Because that was successful, and because I was strongly associated with it in audio, people started to come to me for similar things. And there's a lot of crossover between progression fantasy and LitRPG, so my dance card rapidly filled up with that kind of work. So, while I love almost every genre, that ends up largely being what I do, because those are the people who bang on my door first.

SD: That's awesome. Thanks for coming to ACX. (laughs) Yeah, we're super glad you got started there.

So, considering your background and trove of fantasy novels that you've worked on as a narrator, I'm curious how that affects your writing—having performed so many titles that must have some sort of impact on how you approach your writing. Does it inform how you develop your characters and their mannerisms?

TB: I think it informs everything, and I'm actually really surprised to the degree that it does, because it's not like I didn't write before I published Legends & Lattes. I wrote short stories and novellas. I just never published any of them.

And I can actually look back and see the difference in the way I wrote before and after narrating.

There's a couple of things that are really kind of special that happened as a narrator, to the refinement of your specific taste, like what you actually like as a writer and a reader.

"I can actually look back and see the difference in the way I wrote before and after narrating."

If you read something on the page in your brain, there's parts you don't really respond to or that you think are boring. You just sort of skim on past them, and sometimes you don't even fully appreciate the really good parts because maybe somebody's talking behind you, or you're on the bus, or whatever, you didn't squeeze all the juice out.

As a narrator, you read every line, and you read it full of intention, and your goal is always to assist the author in doing what they set out to do. So when they aren't quite getting there, you can tell, and you can start to get an idea of what you would need to do to get out and push and help them get what they wanted to achieve, to really come across.

And when they're really firing on all six cylinders, you really, really appreciate it, because all of a sudden you're just singing your way through this, and every line feels perfect, and it's really, really wonderful. So, it really crystallizes your specific discernment about fiction in a way that I don't think you get when you're writing, and that you only get over a much longer period of time if you're reading. It's, like, very compressed.

The other thing that happens is that your interior voice develops really, really strongly. Because the act of narration is so predictive, you're basically, kind of, reading ahead in your mind and as you do it for thousands and thousands of hours, you know exactly how you will sound before the words come out of your mouth.

A lot of people talk about editing fiction and they say, "Well you should read your work out loud after you're done, and it'll really help you find the problems." As a narrator, after you've done this for a long time, you get to actually do that upfront before you've even written down the words. So you actually know what the characters sound like and how they would be delivering their lines before you're putting them on the page. It's hard to articulate how cool that is, especially coming from not having been able to think that way before, because my interior voice was not so developed. It was floatier, vaguer.

SD: That seems like a writing super power to me.

TB: It feels like one; it feels like one. It feels like cheating.

SD: Well, I'll let you keep cheating, as long as you keep putting books out. (laughs)

No, that's great. It's great to have that insight. And I feel like, you know, we're all guilty of kind of editing ourselves as we go, so it must be nice to have a sense of how you want something to sound once it's narrated, once it's spoken aloud.

TB: It is, it is. It's really cool.

SD: (laughs) What is your process of finding a voice for a character? I think of some of the characters in your stories, in particular the hobgoblin, Cal, from Legends & Lattes, so perfect. The dwarf and baker, Maylee, who listeners will meet in Bookshops. Both have such strong voices that really fit the characters they embody so well. And yeah, I'm curious how you go about finding those voices. Do they come to you before they end up on the page?

TB: They come pretty much with the character. And one of the things that I ended up convincing myself of as I write is that basically any character should be able to be a main character. If they don't have enough personality to be a main character on their own, then I probably don't want them in the book, because I don't want it to be all about the main character. I want it to be about the relationships with other characters, and those relationships aren't very interesting if those characters can't hold their own.

So, the voice is almost the first thing that comes, because in my head that voice is what gives them contrast, it's how you know who's who and how their conversations are really going to snap and crackle, because if everybody sounds the same then the conversations immediately become kind of one-sided feeling.

"Basically any character should be able to be a main character. If they don't have enough personality to be a main character on their own, then I probably don't want them in the book."

SD: Yeah, absolutely. And you're kind of known for doing those distinct voices too, and I think it makes the characters shine—it makes them stand out in the work. So, you say that the voices come with the characters. Have you ever found a voice first that you wanted to find a character to embody?

TB: I have some voices that I wish I had characters for. There's a few audiobooks that I narrate where I have characters where, like, "Man, I just love doing this voice so much." And I wish I had my own character to, like, steal that voice and make it their own. So, I guess I definitely do have that. (laughs)

SD: (laughs) That's fair. You've got time. (laughs)

So what came first for you then? It sounds like writing has always been in your life. How did you get into writing? Was it before you started as a narrator or did that kind of put the gas on your writing career?

TB: I wanted to write ever since I was a kid—I was a big reader. I tried really hard to write my own, like, Wheel of Time-level fantasy novel when I was in high school. And I started, I think, with the glossary, you know, totally backwards. A friend of mine actually gave me a printout of it, and I don't think I've ever cringed so hard in my life as when they handed that to me.

SD: (laughs) Oh no.

TB: But I've liked writing for a long time, and I, very early on, harbored some dream of being a writer. And I think I probably decided, man, I just couldn't do it; there was no way I was going to. It was too lofty of a goal, and it didn't seem like I was going to be able to accomplish things at the scale that I wanted. Everything had to be, like, big or, like, the great American novel, or whatever, and I think I was kind of scared away by that. So, I enjoyed writing short stories because the stakes were lower for me, personally.

And I definitely enjoyed doing that, but I ... There was a period of time where I tried to get some published in speculative fiction magazines, but it was relatively short-lived. Instead, I did some writing while I made games.

And then, when I switched to narration, I tried to do things, like National Novel Writing Month multiple times in the past, and then I tried to do it a few more times. (laughs) And a narrator friend of mine convinced me to do it again. Aven Shore-Kind, who's a fabulous narrator, basically got me to reattempt National Novel Writing Month. And we both, after one year of failing, (laughs) agreed to just do something basically silly and, like, low risk.

We just kind of stopped believing that we had to write anything good or amazing and instead wrote something simple. And it turns out that simple things can have real value. So, choosing to write something basically ridiculous, which is what Legends & Lattes is—I mean, it’s basically a Hallmark movie set in a fantasy world. And the pitch sounds stupid. If you tell anybody what the book is, "Oh, an Orc retires and opens a coffee shop," it sounds like it's going to be a joke. And initially, it was. But it turns out, you can write something simple earnestly, which was a revelation to me.

"It turns out, you can write something simple earnestly, which was a revelation to me. "

SD: Hm. Yeah, it's sort of letting go of those high lofty expectations and out from that can come something pretty awesome.

TB: Mm-hmm.

SD: And I love that you wrote this during National Novel Writing Month. I too have attempted it many times, (laughs) and it seems like good motivation for any listeners. Like, come on, you can get it done.

TB: Yeah, you can do it, you can do it. I think that, yeah, scaling back your expectations helps a lot, you know, what you demand of yourself, you know? This doesn't have to be the only book you ever write; it doesn't have to be the best thing you're ever going to do. It can just be something that you're interested in.

SD: Right, and there may be something pretty exciting there.

So, we hear a lot in other conversations with other narrators that it can be really challenging to find the time to do their work, which involves so much reading aloud and so much prep work, to find time for reading and listening for pleasure, let alone writing their own work. I'm curious, how do you carve that time out? How do you balance it all?

TB: I definitely have the same issues with being able to read for pleasure, because I like to read for pleasure. So I read a lot of novellas, because they're small, and I can finish them in between books.

As far as writing goes, it helps that there was, like, a constrained time period for it. I thought that I would be able to go out in the world and sit in a coffee shop, and, you know, write, and it would be really neat, but it turns out I can't do that. So I actually write here in my audio booth.

SD: Oh wow.

TB: Because there's no distractions, there's no snacks, and there's really nothing else to do, unless I want to go narrate some more. So, my routine for writing thus far has been after my day of work, and after the kids are home and dinner has been had, I go back down into my booth. And I sit down, and I write one chapter until I can leave, and I do it until the book is done.

So far, that is the only way that I have found, for me personally, to effectively get it done. It definitely does take more time, but from my perspective, it was also really worth it. It was something that I've always wanted to do, so there was definitely a reward to it. I mean, I could go out in, like, a shop and build furniture, or I could learn to play the guitar, or I could do this.

SD: Right.

TB: This was the right thing to do.

SD: It's funny, being a fantasy writer and narrator, I was going to liken your process to locking yourself in a dungeon (laughs), saying, "You have to write, you have to write this chapter," but it's almost like a little box of inspiration instead. You know, it's where you perform all these stories from other writers and it's where you produce your own work.

TB: Yeah, and it's ... You know, honestly, I love my booth. It's a comfortable space.

SD: (laughs) It looks lovely.

TB: I have a nice chair, and it's quiet, and it's mine. I actually appreciate being in here more than I probably should. Sometimes I just come down here if I just need a moment.

SD: It sounds lovely. I wish I had my own. (laughs) I'm in my home office right now—it’s not set up in the same way.

So Legends & Lattes started as a NaNoWriMo project and now, with its runaway success, you've got a contract for three additional titles, much to listeners' benefit. Can you offer any preview into your plans? Will we spend more time with Viv or perhaps other characters in the series?

"It was the easiest and most enjoyable narration I've ever done, bar none."

TB: I will definitely be doing at least one more in the series. I like to do them as standalones that kind of cross over, so that you don't have to read the other books to read them, and I have lots of parts on the floor of the garage, so to speak, for the next book. But I'm also planning, theoretically, to write books that aren't in this world, because I like all kinds of stuff. We'll see how that goes. (laughs) I talked at length about the book I was going to write second, before I wrote it, and then didn't write it.

So, who knows? I know that things can change, and ultimately I'll do what feels like the right thing to do at the time, but I have characters that I want to revisit, that I want to show up. I don't know who will be the mains—I have some ideas, but there are a lot of things in the three books that I threw away that I actually would like to revisit if I can, because I liked lots of things there. So, I hope to get back to them.

SD: That's great.

TB: Very. That's lots of hedging, but … (laughs)

SD: (laughs) That's okay, I get it; I get it. So a bit of a thought exercise. In an alternate universe where you aren't a narrator, which would be a very dark timeline indeed, who else would you choose to narrate your work?

TB: Hmm. Wow. That is really tough, that is really tough. Since Frank Muller has, unfortunately, passed, and I would have said that first. I really love Jim Dale's narration. I think Jim has just a wonderful voice and a real facility for character. Gosh, there's lots of wonderful narrators out there. Phew, this is tough—this is really, really tough. I’ll say Jim Dale.

He just has a real, such a lovely warm voice, and he always knows where the jokes are, and he knows how to land them.

SD: Absolutely, yeah. And I mean, as we've just discussed, maybe it's an impossible question because your narration and your experience as a narrator is so deeply tied into your work that I imagine you're, kind of, the only one who could perform it. (laughs)

TB: I'm sure someone else could do a lovely job, but it's … maybe, I'm just very controlling. It's weird to have written with the narration in mind and then imagine it being narrated a different way, but, you know, never say never.

SD: Would you say it was difficult or enjoyable to narrate your own works?

TB: It was the easiest and most enjoyable narration I've ever done, bar none.

SD: I think that comes through having listened to both now. (laughs)

Well great. Thank you so much, again, Travis, for spending time with us. We can't wait to hear more from you as an author and a narrator. And listeners, you can find Travis Baldree's Bookshops & Bonedust, his first novel, Legends & Lattes, as well as the many, many stories he's narrated here, right on Audible.

TB: Thank you so much.