The Viola Roberts Cozy Mysteries tend to have a few audiobook “Redshirts” in them; characters who show up in a scene as part of the setting and are never heard from again.
Most of the time, they are a fun opportunity to do something (reasonably) outrageous, or more difficult for my voice, because I don’t have to sustain them for hours.
On this occasion, “flat, mid-Western” accent was called out in the text, so I got to play around and give that a shot.
Feel free to critique the clip, especially if you live in “the midwest.”
My take?
It’s campy, and the beginning is wrong, but the end is close. So this lady is actually a midwesterner who has lived…in the south for awhile.
I can hear what’s wrong because my ear is good, but I didn’t have a handy sample of a midwestern accent bookmarked. And it was one line—a total redshirt. So this is the sound of me being lazy; not YouTubing multiple midwestern accents, practicing the line, and perfecting it before recording.
Knowing that there was a much harder and more subtle couplet of accents just ahead in the text that I DID work hard on, I picked my battles.
What do you think?