Yvonne Navarro

Photo Credit: Weston Ochse

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Yvonne Navarro | I Am a Terrible Blogger but A Great Outliner
January 17, 2011
Me? Really? Writers are supposed to know what to say all the time. They can come up with a story in an instant ("It was  Read More...

Yvonne Navarro was born back when black and white photographs were considered normal instead of artsy. As a child she always thought she'd grow up to be an artist and, being a child, was convinced this entailed spending the rest of her days doing line drawings of long, leggy models like the ones that were drawn in the daily newspapers. Life, however, did not cooperate: a foul-up in grammar school resulted in a transfer to a local high school instead of the technical, arts-heavy one she'd planned to attend. Even the best-made plans can go awry.

Following that was a parent-initiated interstate move that really made things start winding around. By the time she returned to Chicago for the second time in 1981 she'd worked as a waitress, a nurse's aide, a bookkeeper and gift shop cashier, an accounting clerk, and a secretary in everything from office furniture stores to a hotel to a journalism society. She returned to take her old job in a Chicago law firm and settle down in the Windy City for awhile. In 1982 she decided to try writing on the advice of her mother, who read one of the books Yvonne recommended and said "You could do this." Frankly, she thought her mother was nuts... but the seed had still been planted. While she sold her first story in 1984 to The Horror Show Magazine, and even got paid a whopping $1.50 for it, it wasn't until 1988 that another story would appear-- the second, as time would tell, of many. Since then she's written over a hundred stories (an early few of which will never see the light of day). Most have been or are scheduled to be published.

Her first novel, AfterAge, was published in 1993 and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. In 1995 her second solo novel, deadrush, was published, and it also was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, this time in the category of Superior Achievement in a novel. Final Impact, her third solo novel, was published in 1997, and won both the Chicago Women In Publishing's Award for Excellence in Adult Fiction and the "Unreal Worlds" Award for Best Horror Paperback of 1997 from the Rocky Mountain News. Since then she has published several more solo novels, Red Shadows (a follow-up to Final Impact), DeadTimes, and That's Not My Name, her first suspense novel. That's Not My Name, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Paleo, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Willow Files, Vol. 2 all won at the Illinois State level of the IWPA 2001 Mate E. Palmer Communications contest (two first place and one second place, respectively), plus she swept all three awards of the Short Story category with "Ascension," "Divine Justice," and "Santa Alma." She's also written a number of media tie-in novels, including several Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Her most recent solo novel is the first in the Dark Redemption series, HIGHBORN, which comes out in October 2010 from Pocket/Juno Books. It will be followed in 2011 by a second book, CONCRETE SAVIOR. Full info about all her books can be found on the Book Page.

In 1999 Yvonne ground her teeth and, after selling her house to get rid of the mortgage, quit her law firm job of fourteen years to try her hand at writing full time. She was hammering right along until some changes in the publishing world as well as a marriage and move across country made her reassess the financial wisdom of fulltime writerdom. She started a new career as an Operations Officer for a military contractor at historic Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. As of 2010, her publication history includes over twenty novels and one non-fiction book, and she still has those never-ending plans for more. She and her husband, author Weston Ochse, share their lives with three Great Danes, Goblin, The Ghost, and Ghoulie, as well as two spoiled and over-sociable parakeets named Poe (as in Edwina Allen) and BirdZilla.

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