“Taylor just spoke to me from the start,” said Cynthia Vail, the voice actor behind Taylor Holmes in Patrice Wilton’s beachy contemporary romance, Hooked on You, Book Two in the Paradise Cove series. She also voiced Book One of the series, Paradise Cove.
“Taylor is a perfectionist, a tomboy at heart, and somebody who is very true to her values… true to a fault, at times,” Vail said. “I think a lot of women can relate to her struggle between her head and her heart.”
In giving Taylor a voice, she knew it had to be strong, positive, a little demure, and different from her sisters in the series. “When you voice a novel, you have the joy of being able to play every character in the book. It’s a ton of fun, but it also presents challenges when a bunch of sisters are talking in the same room!” Vail says she tried a bunch of pitches and paces before settling on the three voices for the sisters. “But their Mom’s voice has been with me all along,” she said. “She has such a humor, wisdom, sexiness, and craziness about her. I love Anna!”
Vail also had fun with the male character of Colt. “I can absolutely picture Colt in my head,” said Vail. “Patrice Wilton writes about her men with such great description… It’s never hard to give him his swagger and confidence.”
The question Vail gets asked the most when people find out she’s a voice actor? How does she handle sex scenes?
“With Patrice’s writing, the steamy scenes are actually easier than you might think. They have a lot of passion and thought behind them. She doesn’t write sex just for the explicit nature. You are really inside the characters’ heads… and I hope I bring that to the voicing.”
Vail says she actually has to stop for breaks when the writing gets emotional. “Hooked on You has several scenes that really got me choked up,” she said. “I won’t tell you which ones… but believe me, I had to stop reading a few times to compose myself with a tissue and a glass of water.”
Make sure you check out the audio version of Hooked on You, Book Two in the Paradise Cove series available on Audible.com! And if you haven’t listened yet, also be sure to get Paradise Cove, Book One.
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