Milwaukee is headed to the Big Apple! Local novelist and playwright Rebecca Anne Nguyen is a finalist for the Audie Awards for the audiobook of her novel The 23rd Hero.
“They say the [Audies] are the Academy Awards of audiobooks,” Nguyen said. “It’s the highest honor that an audiobook can receive.”
The nomination was an “absolute shock,” she said. Her publisher, Castle Bridge Media, submitted her book to the awards, coming as a complete surprise when she got the notification in her email. “I kept waiting for them to write me back and say there’s been a clerical error,” she said.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The 23rd Hero is a science-fiction, time-travel romance in which the heroine travels across multiple countries and time periods. The book has over 30 different characters and more than half of the book is dialogue. The novel is Nguyen’s fiction debut.
Nguyen, nominated in the Narration by the Author category, narrated the book herself, dusting off her background in theater and acting. She worked with dialect coach Erik Singer – who worked with Austin Butler for Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” – to perfect various accents, including French, Swedish and Australian, embodying different genders, ages and dialects with her voice.
She spent about eight months preparing to narrate the book before acting as her own producer and director at a local Milwaukee recording studio. They recorded the book over five days, collaborating with sound engineers and perfecting her accents, making sure not to mistake Australian for British.
“It’s very physically grueling and demanding on the voice, I was blown away at how difficult it was,” Nguyen said. “At the end of the day, I could go about four or five hours at a time, and you’re just shaking by the end of that, and you have to rest your voice. I couldn’t speak to my kids in the evenings, I had to do a text-to-voice robot, like, ‘Go to bed,’” she said, laughing.
Nguyen said she is the only nominee in her category who “is not literally a celebrity or a best-selling author” and represents the only indie publisher in the category. She is nominated against Whoopi Goldberg’s Bits and Pieces, which Nguyen describes as being a “very surreal” situation to be in.
“It’s an absolute honor to be able to go to the awards ceremony in New York,” she said. “I’m very happy to go and represent [Milwaukee,] and that’s another reason it seems like such an anomaly because most of these folks who are nominated are New York and Los Angeles people.”
Nguyen described preparing for the Audies Gala on March 4 as a “treat,” even among the shock of it all.
After her rendezvous in New York City, she will make an appearance at the DSM Book Festival in Des Moines, Iowa and continue working on her second novel.
