I’m an audiobook narrator, actor, professional character obsessor, and the person who will spend entirely too much time figuring out exactly why a character said something the way they did.

The acting is my favorite part of narration. Give me messy characters, complicated relationships, questionable decisions, big emotions, and scenes that let me completely disappear behind the mic. I don’t just want to read you the story…I want to live in it for a little while.

My voice leans warm, sultry, and intimate, but my bookshelf? A little unhinged. Romance, fantasy, dark and atmospheric stories, horror…if there are characters I can sink my teeth into, I’m probably already interested.

But more than anything, I love storytelling.

I love that for a few hours, I get to step into a world someone else created and help bring it to life. I love finding the tiny moments between the words…the hesitation, the heartbreak, the laugh somebody is trying to hide, the sentence that means something completely different because of the WAY a character says it. I love figuring out who these people are and then getting behind the mic and letting them exist and sending them out into the world.

And I love knowing that somewhere on the other side of those headphones, someone is listening.

Maybe they’re driving to work. Maybe they’re escaping a hard day. Maybe this is the story they’ve been waiting for. Maybe they’ll fall in love with a character that I got to love first.

That means something to me. That means EVERYTHING to me.

I genuinely love this job. I love the strange, beautiful little privilege of getting to tell stories for a living, and I want to keep doing it for a very, very long time.

So if you’ve got a story that needs a voice, come tell me about it.

Let’s make some noise.
mj.ellis.va@gmail.com