Spokane resident Travis Baldree is a former video game programmer, a current audiobook narrator and an author. He wrote “Legends & Lattes,” a cozy fantasy book that is getting a graphic novel adaptation coming out Oct. 6. SPR’s Lisa Leinberger sat down with him.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lisa Leinberger: Tell me about Legends & Lattes, the book that’s been adapted into a graphic novel.
Travis Baldree: So, if you've never heard of Legends and Lattes before, it is, I think, what's commonly termed cozy fantasy. It is the story of an orc mercenary who decides that she wants to retire and open up a coffee shop in a town that's never heard of coffee before. And it's, it came out and it did remarkably well, and they kept asking me to write new ones.
LL: Do you find that people are just feeling kind of down about the world, and they kind of gravitate towards cozy novels and cozy fantasy, cozy mysteries, that kind of genre these days?
TB: I think that it reminds us that everyday things are important. You use kind of the trappings of sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, to put a little fairy dust on stuff that happens all the time. And none of us are going to go and slay a dragon, but we are going to try to find friends in our 40s and deal with career changes and stuff, and we tend to think that stuff is mundane and boring and not important because everybody experiences it. But I think it’s kind of the reverse. It’s the most important because everybody experiences it, and I think there’s just this reaffirmation that these things that happen to us all the time matter.
The graphic novel, I’m really happy with the way the graphic novel came out.
I think if you’ve read the book and you read the graphic novel, you’ll be like, yup, that’s it.
But now I get to see it. And I think for people who have not read the book and that are more graphic novel readers, I think it’s a great way to read it. Because it is the book. Legends and Lattes was not an incredibly long book or an incredibly complicated book, and I think it lent itself well to translation.
I think it works really, really well as a graphic novel. And the art’s fabulous, and it’s just very well done.
LL: Tell me a little bit about some of your audiobook narrations.
TB: I started doing it as a hobby. My kids didn't need me to read to them anymore, and I was a big fan of audiobooks, and I stumbled across a service that basically pairs narrators with authors, and I ended up doing it as a hobby. It's fun. I liked it. I like reading out loud.
LL: Had you done any acting in the past? I know that’s coming with voices and emoting. That’s gotta be…there’s gotta be a lot of acting.
TB: If you’re an actor, and you go to act in a movie, they cast you based on who you are. You’re going to play this kind of character because that’s what your physicality is. That’s what your voice sounds like. In audiobook narration, none of that matters. You play all the characters. I’m not a 12-year-old teen princess, and yet I will have to voice one, so it’s very…it’s a very different skill set in a lot of ways.
LL: So, not only have you narrated your own books, you’ve also narrated hundreds and hundreds of other people’s books. One of whom is Matt Dinniman, who is the author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. You are Raul in the Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Can you tell me how you got that gig?
TB: I think Matt just asked Jeff. Jeff Hayes is the main narrator for Dungeon Crawler Carl, for those of you who don’t know. He asked if he could do a bit part for me, and I think that in some ways it’s supposed to evoke a lot of the characters that I have played in other books that I have read, but obviously infinitely more foul. And so, it was really…it was like a 30-minute thing. Got on a Discord with Jeff, banged out my lines. The end.
LL: What are you working on next? Is it another book in the series?
TB: There’s three in the series, and then a collection of short stories comes out in like a week, around the same time as the graphic novel. I’m working on it. Actually, I wrote another book. I’m in editing right now, I’m wrapping it up. But it’s not in the Legends & Lattes world at all. It’s significantly longer, and it is more litRPG. I’ve narrated so many litRPGs that I have opinions, so I wrote one the way that I would write it.
It’s long. But it’s also stand-alone, or can be. One of my beefs with litRPG is that sometimes they just never end, and I like a story that finishes, because I don’t have time to read 20 volumes of a book. So, I appreciate a finished story. But yeah, I think that’s going to come out next August, and it’s called Four Bastards and a Baby.
