Yvonne Navarro -- Chicago on the Darkside

by

Don Kinney

Yvonne Navarro is a Chicago area author/artist who has been publishing her writing and dark fantasy illustrations in many magazines and anthologies since 1984. Her first novel, AfterAge, was published in September, 1993 and was a finalist for the 1993 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

In 1995 she novelized the MGM movie SPECIES to coincide with the movie release and her novel, deadrush, was released in October of the same year. Once again, Yvonne was a Bram Stoker Award finalist when deadrush was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in a Novel for 1995 by the Horror Writers Association. She also novelized the Dark Horse comic, Aliens: Music of the Spears. Most recently, Final Impact -- Yvonne’s end-of-the-world, epic dark fantasy -- was published by Bantam (as are all of her novels.) She is also the author of The First Name Reverse Dictionary, a character name reference book for writers published by McFarland and Co., Inc. The best place to keep current with Yvonne is her web site: Creaturette's Darke Palace; http://www.para-net.com/~ynavarro.

Don: You're a full time legal secretary by day and have been for more years than you'll admit. How did you start writing and how does full time work impact on your writing?

Yvonne: I generally tell everyone I started this whole mess by learning to write complaint letters that actually worked. But that's not really true-- if I think back, I was "writing" as early as seven or eight years old, drawing up little comic strips with stories in them, thinking up scenes in my head. My first attempt at a complete project was the mini newspaper I put together (I think I was eight), with the appropriate cat cartoon character and the heading "Dr. Seuss Dies in Fire!" I was headed toward darkness even then.

Full time work is the knife in my side. While I'm up at all hours and run on only four or five hours of sleep out of necessity, I prefer the daylight hours and sunshine. I am much more productive during the day and this means that the office job unwillingly gets the best of what I have to offer. Like everyone else, the evenings and weekends are plagued by never-ending errands and chores that must be accomplished, and writing has to be squeezed in there somewhere. The one advantage I do have is a commute that takes more than an hour from home to work; I use a laptop and usually manage to get writing done on the train.

D: What writers or styles of writing have influenced your work?

Y: Robert McCammon was, literally, the writer who started the desire in me to write fiction. He, F. Paul Wilson, and to some extent Stephen King, as well as a number of other fine novelists, have the ability to literally make you forget that you're reading. That's what I like best, and what I strive for in my own work.

D: Since you maintain a web page you must think the Internet has some potential. What's your take on the Information Superhighway ?

Y: I believe that the Internet is the most inexpensive yet powerful marketing tool that exists in the world today, for any business. For the cost of ISP service and hard drive space (and perhaps a fee to someone else if you can't set up your own site), a writer can send materials around the globe. A good example of this is the email I got from a bookstore in Ireland at the end of January telling me that Final Impact had already sold out (its official release date was February) and asking about the availability of AfterAge, my vampire novel published in 1993. People stumble across my site all the time, then go out and hunt for the books. It's a wonderful way to present your work to the world.

The downside is that coding and maintaining your own site (and too much email) is a serious time burner, and if you get the bug for it, nearly as addictive as computer games. I admit I got bit-- I started my own page design business, Webette Designs, in addition to the writing and the full time day job. The coding isn't too suffocating, but the graphics work takes immense time. What ultimately suffered was the writing time, and I finally made the decision to cut back on the web page business. Now I'll generally allow myself to do web work only one night per week.

D: How do you approach novel writing? Do you outline, build character profiles? Is there a different approach for short stories?

Y: I do use some sort of an outline, although it's not a rigid thing. All of my solo novels have had outlines, although AfterAge built itself as it went along and the outline was more to keep track of a very complex plot and give me something to expand into a synopsis with which to sell the novel. deadrush was outlined in full before I started it, although the outline changed. Final Impact ... now there's a good example of why a writer needs an outline. I had one, but it was woefully incomplete, and it wasn't until I was four-fifths into the book that I finally figured out how to end it. At one point I had all these characters standing around in a circle, looking at the bodies left from a big action scene, and... there they were. I felt like they were looking up at the sky and saying "Now what?!" With Species I used the three scripts I received to write the novel, and with Aliens: Music of the Spears I made an expanded outline from the comic books. For Red Shadows (the follow-up to Final Impact), I made an outline of 29 chapters to go with the proposal even though the publisher said it wasn't necessary. I did it for myself because that situation with Final Impact unnerved me and I wanted to know, right from the start, where this book was going. The 29 chapters in the outline for the new book have now increased to 52.

My characters are like my children, and if someone's going to be in the book with any regularity I do a full character chart, including everything from favorite color to family history. They have addresses, music and books and decorating preferences, fears, careers, childhood histories. 90% of this never gets in the book but I think it makes them complete and that shows in their thoughts. Occasionally a character will grow in and of herself, like Lily did in Final Impact. She wasn't intended to be there very long and never had a character chart, but she not only became very important, she's one of my favorite characters. As for short stories, it depends on the story. Most of those get planned out in my head. If I'm getting good images and scenes, I might start typing out snippets or paragraphs and put it all together later. If it's a really complicated story, I've been known to make a short outline.

D: In deadrush you dealt with an interracial relationship in its infancy and some of the troubles that entails for the couple. What made you want to tread into those waters?

Y: It wasn't a conscious decision, just something that grew out of the characters in the story. The troubles were easy to envision (and I only scratched the surface) because I have an older family member in this situation. This person is now elderly and still has trouble dealing psychologically with the decision to interracially marry that they made nearly 40 years ago, the result of an old-fashioned upbringing.

D: Your settings for your novels have been near your Chicago home or you've had friends detail other cityscapes for you. Do you think your fiction will continued to be set wherever you live or will you range to more exotic locales as you grow as a writer?

Y: I'd like to go to New Zealand. Ha ha. But seriously, Red Shadows has of necessity moved out of the Chicago area. But I have a psychological thriller fully outlined and written to about page 120, that's rooted firmly in Chicago suburbia. I also have detailed notes on a sequel to AfterAge that I hope to write someday. This time the action has moved to Phoenix.

D: What's the most challenging piece of prose you've ever written?

Y: Without a doubt it was Final Impact. I had no idea it was that hard to destroy the world, and the scientific end of the book-- the astronomy, the physics, the geological catastrophes and what ultimately happens to the Earth-- resulted in a huge and very complicated project. I couldn't have done it without the significant contribution by my friend Rich Marasas, Jr., who is also a physicist. I told Rich I wanted the impossible to happen to the Earth and he literally came up with the scenario where it could.

D: Tell us about the FIRST NAME REVERSE DICTIONARY. How did you come up with the idea for the book? How long did the project take?

Y: God, that thing took years to finish. Simply put, I made the book for me, as a writer. More than eighty percent of my character names mean something, even in stories, relating to their personalities or what's going to happen to them or how they're going to affect others. I got tired of spending literally hours searching for a single name to properly name a character, and I started putting this book, a "backwards" name dictionary, together in my spare time. Depending on what was going on in my life, I'd spend a few minutes a week, or several hours a day on it. The thing went through two different computers because the first one couldn't handle the alphabetical search demands on it, and I had to retype nearly 400 pages of entries when I went to the second computer because they weren't compatible. When McFarland bought it, I ended up reformatting the entries at least twice, then compiling the index. The upshot is that the thing will probably be in print for years (although sales have dropped off) because reference books are like that. It's an expensive book, relatively small, but it's made for libraries and will last forever. And it's fun just to browse through.

D: What research tools and sources do you use?

Y: You know what? Computers are fun, CD-ROM disks are fun, and the Internet is a huge research tool... but nothing beats a good, old-fashioned book. I love to just page through encyclopaedias and reference books-- I'm always buying tons of used books on the strangest subjects. The Net is a great way to make sure your science-related research is current, but those wonderful books do just fine for so much. I fill the pages with multi-colored plastic paperclips and Post-It Notes.

D: Of your current body of work, what are your favorite novel(s) or story(ies)? Your favorite character(s)?

Y: That's a tough one. I always seem to hold the novel I'm working on (or perhaps just completed) as my favorite, so as of right now, I guess that'd be Final Impact. Final Impact just sort of... overwhelms me, because frankly, I had doubts all through the project that I'd be able to pull it off. I can't pick a favorite story because my stories have different "tones" and a lot of them can't be compared with each other-- how do you compare an erotic vampire story to a horrifying tale of child abuse that got its start from a true incident? There are a lot of stories out there that I wish had had more exposure but that's the perils of small press magazines. As for a favorite character, Lily (from Final Impact) comes immediately to mind; I created her just to protect Mercy, never intended her to be around for more than a few chapters, and she took control of major parts of the tale.

D: Tell us how each of your novels came to be and talk about your project you’ve titled DeadTimes.

Y: AfterAge started as a short-short, published in THE SILVER WEB. Ann Kennedy, to whom I will be eternally grateful, bought the story and wrote me a note saying that it had such powerful imagery that I should turn it into a novel. I had a lot of fun with AfterAge and really developed an affinity for the characters that I didn't see again until Final Impact. There are people in there I killed off that I still wish I hadn't (but face it, how do you bring someone back when they just jumped off a high-rise roof and became sidewalk mush?).

My second novel was intended to be DeadTimes, but my agent and I decided against offering it because of its strange format. DeadTimes is more a collection of nine novelettes with a beginning and an end-- the same character runs through all of them in a continuing, "time-jumping" tale. Because of its format (not exactly mass market appeal), we felt (rightly so) that Bantam wouldn't be interested in it. I'm biased, of course, but I think DeadTimes is a fun novel that lots of people would enjoy-- it has everything in it-- action, witches, vampires, the KKK, voodoo, plus a good dose of modern times. But I also know it would be better suited as a limited edition, but so far it's still unsold. deadrush was written over a nine-month timespan to fill that second novel slot in the contract, and the whole thing grew from a six-word idea jotted in one of my "idea notebooks." It's funny to look back on those original notes and see just how different they are from the finished product. My editor at the time was Janna Silverstein, and she made some key suggestions on the outline I submitted. Janna is very sharp.

Final Impact was another novel that grew from a one sentence question, and again, turned out quite differently than anticipated. I knew that there would be a lot of interest in end-of-the-world themes, and took advantage of an idea I had that went with it. The book took a long time to complete-- it was stopped twice for media novels-- and ended up being nearly two years late. Bantam had already put it on the schedule and we were all starting to freak out a little toward the end. The one advantage was that I got to know my base characters really well, because I had to reread everything I'd written every time I started work on it again.

D: How did you sell your first novel?

Y: I got an agent solely because of Mr. Joe Lansdale His-Ownself, who to this day has no idea just how much he did for me by telling me to send my novel to this agent and saying he (Joe) recommended him (the agent). This was the only reason the agent agreed to read it; he later told me he did so only as a courtesy to Joe and fully intended to pass on it... until the writing hooked him. Thus, Joe gave me an agent.

D: Talk about working on media novels -- the good, the bad, the worse.

Y: Media novels are a mixed blessing-- relatively fast money... but not that much of it; hard deadlines... but then they're over and done with; potentially (as in Species) huge exposure. For me Species was a like a pot of gold-- I was unknown and here was the chance to get my name on over 100,000 books and in nine different languages. Aliens: Music of the Spears was more of the same but not as many books (although the book is now in its second printing). It was a chance to reach out to the science fiction readers, too.

The bad thing about media novels is that it's writing by committee -- everyone has something to say about what you're writing and how you should write it. Sometimes the suggestions are right on target, but a lot of the time they're not. Basically you've got a script or a set of graphic novels and it's your job to fill in the "somehows"-- "Somehow he gets the gun away from the bad guy," or "Somehow she manages to climb up the side of the (impossibly high) cliff." It's amazing how many times the word "somehow" can appear in one scene of a movie script, but that same "somehow" won't cut it in the pages of a book.

D: Any nibbles from Hollywood toward your novels?

Y: Alas, no. I always thought AfterAge would make a wonderful movie, and DeadTimes is perfect for a nine-segment Tales from the Crypt type of thing. deadrush could be a great zombie flick. For Final Imact, I just keep getting "we've already started/done/planned." Maybe someday.

D: What do you do for fun and leisure?

Y: I have a lot of things I'd like to do, but not much time for it. I keep hoping that I'll get back some of that leisure time if I can let go of the day job and devote the day to writing-- a big wish is that I'd like to start drawing again. The last illustration I did was of the "Pumpkinhead" monster in the Stamford World Horror Program Book. I always wanted to do illustrations to go with DeadTimes, and my Dad even built me a beautifully handcrafted laptop lightbox to work on. I used to do a lot of macrame (I have several huge wallhangings) and also a lot of cooking. What's funny is that I keep buying cookbooks and cooking equipment, but end up eating frozen junk. At my request, my Dad also got me an obscenely expensive pasta machine for Christmas several years ago that I've never plugged in-- no time!

D: How do you discipline/schedule yourself so you'll write instead of straying to your other interests and entertainment?

Y: I was doing really well with that for quite some time, just by the bottom-line "buckle down and DO IT!" method... then along came the Internet. I have a real taste for HTML coding and web page designing and spent way too much time organzing a mini-business that I had hoped would pull me out of day job work and let me stay at home where I could devote wasted travel time to writing. While I designed and coded a lot of pages, unfortunately I made no money. I got to the point, not that long ago, that I realized this was actively interfering with my writing and I've slashed the time for playing on the Internet to one night a week and am reinstituting the discipline factors. I had some unexpected outside influences that have finally cleared up, and I expect to be able to devote major time once again to the writing.

D: Favorite books or stories? All-time standouts and recent purchases?

Y: My all-time favorite book is They Thirst by Robert McCammon-- I haven't had time to read it in years but I can still quote the beginning and ending lines. As for a favorite story, "Family Man" by Jeff Gelb always comes to mind. I don't buy as much fiction as I used to, because I don't have time to read much anymore. I still buy novels and collections by favorite authors and friends though, and hope that someday I'll be able to read them. Two recent purchases have been Marrying Mom and First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith. I admire this woman very much for having the guts to quit day work and take a stab at writing full time.

D: Other than the Chicago setting, do you use autobiographical details in your work -- personal fears and experiences?

Y: Of course. Doesn't everyone? And I regularly pilfer from other peoples' lives, too. Autobiographical stuff probably shows up most glaringly in short stories, though-- I've had my Dad read some stuff and tell me flat out that he doesn't like it because of that reason, and my Mom's read other stuff and started crying. And of course there are the stories that I don't even tell them exist.

D: Is there a story you wish you hadn't written?

Y: A whole slew of them, and thankfully most were never published!

D: When did you realize you had developed your writing voice?

Y: I'm not so sure I have a specific "voice," and if I do, I hope it's not ever through being developed. I'd like to think I can always find room for improvement and strive for more.

D: You seem to be able to write different types of genre novels. Going to venture farther than the horror/dark fantasy field someday? What about projects in the queue?

Y: I have all kinds of stuff planned, including a psychological thriller, a science fiction novel, and ideas for a mainstream novel or two. As far as projects on the list... Right now I'm working on the follow-up to Final Impact, a book called Red Shadows which takes place twenty years after impact. Red Shadows is part of a two-book contract with Bantam, and I've talked with my editor, Anne Lesley Groell, about finishing a long-running psychological thriller called That's Not My Name and turning that in as the second book. The contract gives Bantam an option on a third novel, and I haven't decided about that yet. There are a number of ideas percolating, including detailed notes on a sequel to AfterAge. Lots of people have asked for one, plus a few have asked about a sequel to deadrush although I don't have one planned right now.

D: Do you have a dream book you'd like to write? One that would push your talents to the next notch?

Y: If I dream of anything, it's having the time to write all the books I want to. If by "dream book" you mean delving into what my fantasy is, I'd just like to come up with one that would enable me to write full time and not have to worry about where the mortgage payment's coming from. Sometimes I think I'm just too practical to be a writer.

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