Two heads are better than one

Cathryn and Lynsey Davies are identical twins from Cardiff, who write horror and fantasy.

Recently they’ve had their first bit of success with a short story, End of the Innocence, dealing with ‘happy slapping’, murder and revenge. The story is set to appear in Legend Press’s 8 Hours anthology.

‘We nearly died from shock when we got the phone call, as we’re sure other writers know, we thought rejection after rejection would just lead to more rejections.’

They write collaboratively under the single pseudonym of CL Raven as they ‘share the same mind’. It seems that many of the problems associated with collaborative writing don’t apply if you share enough genes.

‘With short stories, we write a page each then do the redrafts together. For poems, we work together and for novels, we write separately, with input on each other’s.

‘It doesn’t cause any problems, because we’re used to finishing each other’s sentences when speaking and we’re on the same wavelength.’

They spend almost all of their time writing or talking about writing as they both suffer from social phobia. They are unable to work and find it offers a reprieve from reality.

‘We’ve found that writing has been a tremendous help over the years. We wouldn’t have gotten through the depression and subsequent social phobia (which we’re still battling) without it. It helps us to escape. We can take ourselves to a different life, become someone else for a while, it’s great.

‘We spend all day discussing stories when we’re not writing, so we take care not to talk about gory murders in public!’

They’re currently working on a book each. One is a fantasy/black comedy in the style of Tim Burton about a winged skeleton (Stetian) who rules over Eternius the land of the dead. The other is a fantasy novel set in ‘Darklands’ (hell).

At only 25 they have plenty of time to achieve their goal of ‘unseating Stephen King from his horror throne’.