What is a horror? We had no idea, now we do. Kind of…

My name is Kate DeLong and I’m a fantasy writer stuffed with candy floss and rainbow unicorns. And I’m Sara Gustavsson Stark, another fantasy writer who thinks the world would be better if everyone ate more cookies. We spend a lot of time in other worlds because this one kinda sucks but none of them have been filled with quite so much horror.   

We had no idea what we were getting into. How do you start writing in a new genre when your life has been consumed by another? Do you approach it… philosophically?

Theoretically? With force and later fix the scrambles with duct tape? What’s the right amount of blood? Can it just be mysterious or psychological? Does that qualify as a horror? It’s a rabbit hole that goes around in circles, and we just kept running.

Twisted 50 forced us both out of our comfort zones in the best way even if we started with shooting ourselves in the foot by entering a week before the deadline. There were laughs, there were tears, there were times Kate wanted to tear chunks of her pre-greying hair out and there were times when Sara desperately wished for the trolls to steal her back to the woods once and for all. Everyone needs a place to start, and we did by revisiting the familiar, creating a strong protagonist. 

We were both intrigued by the perspective of a villain. What goes on in the head of a psychotic little girl or a man who’s been trapped in an asylum for seven years? When you explore it, you get narrators who are completely unreliable, making for twisted tales that leave audiences second guessing the validity of events. What happens when someone who’s completely broken suddenly realises that they hold the power to shape their own destiny? You get characters who can be moulded into villains with grey moral motives that can be contorted into something righteous. In their own way, they are the heroes of their own journeys.

The point is, if we can do it, you can too. We’re still not sure we actually wrote a horror, but we were not disqualified so that’s something. If even the tiniest part of you is thinking of trying, just jump on it. Don’t think twice. It’s an excellent opportunity to play pretend and grow as a writer. We learned that with support from each other, all is possible. Who knows, we might just write another one.