The Indie Cats of Ulthar

We should’ve been working on Penny and the Silver Key #4 or writing the blog posts we had already planned, but instead, we made a banner for this idea for an occult detective story/possible series we've been playing with.

In  Blogging on Blogger , we said that we created a test blog, The Bog Witch, to try out all the Blogger Themes. Since The Bog Witch is a personal blog dedicated to obscure folklore and the occult, we wanted it to be a bit dark and mysterious. We made 2 Title Headers on Canva, a couple of background images, wrote 1 short intro that doubled as the About page, one half post, and at one point copied a much longer post that had already been published on another blog. We decided to leave out the Soho and the Emporio Themes because they’re clearly geared for images rather than plain text, or a combination of both like most of the other Themes.  

We’ve already complained about WordPress’s fugly free Themes ( here and here ) and now it’s Blogger’s turn. We’ll be splitting our observations in 2 posts. This first one is more about how we settled on our current 2 blog Themes, and the next one will be about an experiment we made with a test blog and all 12 Blogger Themes.

In a previous post , we wrote about how Zazzie , a fluffy cat that shows up in our books, helped us create a recognizable image across platforms. However, we believe he has also led to some misunderstandings, and things might look weirder now that we revealed his secret in  Penny and the Silver Key #3 (as long as anyone reads it, of course).

We mentioned Skeetdeck in Self-Promoting on Bluesky: Algorithm Free? as a way to save drafts and compose threads directly, which are 2 basic functionalities missing from the social media platform. At the time, we hadn't tried it yet, but recently, we posted a thread from there and things got weird.

We've had several sources of inspiration for An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying , and a very big one was the works of H P Lovecraft. That's the most visible with Bob and Book 5, the ongoing Penny and the Silver Key  ( here and here ). One of the things we took from Lovecraft were the Dreamlands. We didn't just copy it, though - while the geography and names remain the same, our Dreamlands aren't very dreamy...

When we first wrote about Bluesky for the main blog, we included a bit about creating Feeds and our experiences with 3 of the available, no-code-needed Feed builders. On our first post for this blog , which is a mix of the 2 we wrote about the social media platform, we decided to focus only on the self-promoting. However, the blog's tagline does say 'social media mishaps', so it feels right to post it here, too.

At the precise moment in which we made the decision to post less and spend more time on our WIP, Bluesky sent that invite code we had asked for ages ago. Great timing, Bluesky, great timing… Still, we created an account and started posting.

We already wrote about our first months attempting to self-promote on Twitter and how, more than 2 years later, we still haven't been able to find the path to success. Well, let's just say that our experience with Twitter has been a lot more rewarding than our time on Instagram and now Threads.

The Order was founded thousands of years ago in Egypt. Its goal is to protect defenceless humans from the vicious creatures that lurk in the shadows, awaiting an opportunity to strike. One of its first missions was helping King Kreon of Thebes defeat a zombie army led by Antigone and her brother Polyneikes . The Order has faced many threats, which is why it takes the training of its recruits very seriously. They must not only excel at physical tasks, but also master the use of specially designed weapons, as well as study its vast collection of texts on supernatural creatures. Even more important, they must be willing to give their lives if needed be to fulfill their duty.

In Blogging Woes 1: The Beginning of the Spin-Off Saga , we described our first attempts at maintaining a presence on WordPress.com. The woeing continues here, where we will reveal what finally made us give up and leave.

Penelope 'Penny' Mai  was born in 28 February 1996 in Hong Kong and moved to the UK in 2000 with her father. Her mother decided not to join them and stayed behind with Penny's little brother, Andy.

You met Tim in  Lesson One: Vampires , right when he was given his first solo mission as a monster slayer. After that, you saw him face a mummy and more in  Mummy Issues , and in  Tim's Winter Adventure  you got a glimpse of his pre- Lesson One monster slaying. Now, we'll show you what happened  before  Tim even joined the Order .

Completing  Penny and the Silver Key #3  wasn't as easy as we'd hoped even though we knew where we wanted it to end and had a pretty good idea of how we wanted to get there. The basic outline stayed the same, but the characters were pretty different. Originally, this was going to be a quiet moment for Penny before continuing her search for a way back to her world, but as we developed it, things got progressively darker. This must be the least humorous book we've ever created. There is some humour, but very little. In  Penny and the Silver Key Part 1  we turned baby-eating lizard people into a dark comedy moment, but not here. The future isn't fun.  Penny and the Silver Key #3  will also reveal more about the King in Yellow.

Our blogging experience has been at times a tumultuous one. Our first clash with Blogger's reporting policy was when a now unpublished post, Kinky Weekend: Kinky Match , which compared 4 kinky movies ( Hellraiser , Love and Leashes , Fifty Shades of Grey , and 365 Days ), was flagged as too spicy to be seen without checking your age first. This is made by logging into one's Google account, and how many people are willing to do that for a random blog post? Judging by how the views instantly stopped after that, we're guessing not many. Our second clash was a little more serious.

Our plans for An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying have suffered several changes and its covers have changed with them.

Like we wrote in About Tim's Winter Adventure , that wasn't the first prequel set in the world of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying we created - the first, though yet unpublished was Antigone: Zombie Revenge . As it's clear from the title, it's a retelling of the myth of Antigone featuring zombies.

Earlier this year, we published on Kobo a new book in An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying , and it wasn't Penny and the Silver Key #3 . It was a prequel adventure titled  Tim’s Winter Adventure . It started as a challenge we set for ourselves - to create a a Christmas-themed monster slaying adventure between 15th December and 6th January. Needless to say, we didn’t meet our self-imposed deadline, but still managed to complete it when people weren’t entirely over Holiday Season yet - 15th January - so, yay, us?

In Geek Addiction , Penny ended up at a rehab clinic harbouring a dark secret, but she wasn't the first one to go through that. Before Penny, there was Emma.

Lesson One: Vampires was written between 2013 and 2016, and the pop culture references reflect that. Though we never actually stated when the events were taking place in the story itself, 2016 is the date that appears in the diagram we made to keep track of all the alternate timelines.

Penny and the Silver Key  takes place some time after  Geek Addiction . Penny just wants everything to go back to normal, but naturally, the universe has other plans.  Bob , Supreme Ruler of the Dreamlands, is looking for the next recipient of the Silver Key, which has the power to send whoever uses it to a world where all their wishes have come true... or into the hungry, tentacled embrace of the ancient beings who inhabit the space between worlds. Guess which happens more often. Bob and his Silver Key made their debut in  Mummy Issues , and things didn't turn out so well for the previous user of the Key. Now, it's Penny's turn...

The discussion over AI Art has been getting ever more urgent and heated. On one side, we have artists, who complain about having their art stolen and copied by several art-oriented machine learning softwares that then present them as new artworks to their users. On the other side, we have people who can't afford to hire an artist or are delighted to finally be able to make their own art. This is a complex issue full of grey areas in which no side is completely right or completely wrong...

Welcome faithful readers and newcomers alike. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Theodore Stoker and I love all things supernatural, the weirder and freakier the better. Today, I’m going to tell you the story of Brother Lucas, a Venetian monk from the XIII century.

It's time for more character introductions! This time, it's Bob.

  After the video of Penny killing a vampire goes viral, she agrees to become a patient at Dr Lem's geek rehab clinic. However, she soon begins to suspect there's something very wrong going on...  Geek Addiction  is the fourth story in the series and is also Penny's debut as a lead character.

As authors trying to promote our work online, we believe it's important to have a good image/name combo. For a long time we didn't even have a profile pic on Twitter. We also had some trouble finding a good name and went through several Lovecraftian ones before deciding on The Snarky Cats of Ulthar.

We joined social media, more specifically, Twitter, in February 2022 to promote Lesson One: Vampires and our first blog. It took some time until we figured things out. We didn't have a profile pic, not even a name, just the handle, for a while. Our first promo posts were embarrassing and went mostly unnoticed. Later, we started correcting a few things, though we didn't immediately became The Snarky Cats of Ulthar. However, it only took a few months for us to see that things were going to be harder than we had thought, and we hadn't expected them to be easy.

Rebellion   centres on Maggie and Nina's attempt to start their own feminist group but it also features Lisa plotting revenge, a cameo from Maggie's actress sister Cathy, evil pizza, and... tentacles! It takes place after  Mummy Issues  and overlaps with the next story,  Geek Addiction .

And after Tim, meet Penny!

This is probably a good time to introduce the leads of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying . Let's start with Tim.

We originally wrote about this a few months after we joined Twitter. Thankfully, the Writers Lift (Writer's Lift?) subsequently lost popularity, though we're sure that muting #writerslift helped, too.

  Mummy Issues  takes place right after  Lesson One: Vampires , which showed Tim answering a call asking for help in the end, and sees him hunting down a revived Egyptian mummy in a museum. However, that's not the only threat lurking around...

We already mentioned our failed first attempt at keeping a blog in the first post , but here's a more detailed description of how that went down and why we won't be trying the oft recommended self-hosted option again.

Here's a better look at the historical vampires of Lesson One: Vampires , Book 1 of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying . ERZSÉBET BÁTHORY The Blood Countess wants revenge on the Order for the death of her husband and partner in crime. She's been hunting down monster slayers and applying a very particular punishment. Some might even consider it worse than death. She has 2 vampire sons, and a tense relationship with her fellow vampire and distant cousin Vlad, the Impaler. Naturally, we couldn't leave out her famous blood baths, though in this case, it's more of a blood shower. VLAD, THE IMPALER The vampire attack takes place at Vlad's castle, and he wastes no time in making himself at home again and reopen his secret dungeons. He has 2 brides, Nadia and Marie, and when Tim kills one of them, he decides to ignore Countess Báthory's request that she be the one to kill the monster slayer sent by the Order. SHAKESPEARE AND MARLOWE They were sent by t...

    This was the beginning of  An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying . The first draft was only about 80 pages and was created a whole decade ago. The final version was finished in 2016 and first published in 2021. It's 154 pages long. We came up with the basic plot after wondering what  Fright Night  (1985) would be like in a post- Twilight  world. The very first scene we thought of was the one where Lisa 'thanks' Tim for saving her. The whole story evolved from this one panel that you can see below.

We started our journey as indie authors in 2021 when we gave up on trying to find an agent and uploaded  Lesson One: Vampires Parts 1 & 2 to Rakuten Kobo's online store. That's Book 1 of our SFF digital comic book series An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying . The file was too big so we had to split it in two. This was definitely not like we had envisioned things. We had wanted not only a physical book, but also a single volume. And this wasn't the only time our carefully laid plans were crushed.