Thanks to a kind reader donation, there will be two pages this week! The first is the one that’s up now and the second will be coming on Friday. As usual, the counter will roll over to zero and another bonus page will be available once it reaches $25 again. (Find out more about bonus comics by checking out the Shop!)

Thank you for your patience with my schedule slippage. I am going to put together a note in the sidebar so I (and you) can keep track of how many pages are still owed. It’s my plan to make them all up, I just have to get my life back in order, which might take a little time. Remember, you can follow Messenger via Twitter, RSS, Facebook, or Tumblr to have updates delivered straight to you when they happen! Don’t forget: activity in comments or on the forums are also extremely motivating for me! It excites me when people are interested in my story, so don’t be shy if you’ve been considering joining up with the forum or leaving a comment.

Gears was just a quick and dirty opportunity for me to try some things out without doing a full comic. I might try and do another vote incentive comic series eventually, in a different style. First I need to knock this book out of the way. :V

As a quick extra note, Messenger’s Facebook page now updates automatically. So if you use Facebook, you can have updates and other extra stuff delievered straight to your news feed, all while helping to support and promote the comic. Handy!

In addition to that, I’ve been doing a little general maintenance in my spare time and the following pages have been updated:

• Q & A: Old answers updated, new questions added, and added a form for quick and easy question asking!
• Links: New links added, as well as a new link section for comics and art resources.
• Feeds: a new page for all things feedy. Quick RSS links for Google, Yahoo!, AOL and other popular feed readers, as well as Twitter and E-mail updates!
• Sketchblog! Back before I moved, I started up a little sketchblog for miscellaneous drawings. Then I moved, and never had time to do anything with it. Now I do have time, and I’m back to posting once in a while!

I’ve been playing around with offering advertising on the site in order to help make it more self-sufficient. The ad provider I have chosen will display some graphic ads in addition to text ads. If at any point, the ads become too obnoxious or if they are offensive, please do not hesistate to contact me so I can take care of the problem immediately! Although the ads are important to help keep the site running, my readers are more important and your opinion matters. I’ve also added a page about buying ads on the site, should anyone run across this who wants to or something.

I also wanted to thank the batch of new followers I’ve acquired this week on Twitter! It’s been Follow Bug Week or something, I swear. Might I point you in the direction of Messenger’s facebook fan page as well?

Don’t forget the offer for extra pages that’s going on this month, and the new donation wallpaper that’s now available!

Now, to blow off the rest of my weekend playing Pokemon Platinum… Anyone up for trades? ;D

There are new previews up in the members-only section of the forum for next week’s page.

The new incentive isn’t up because I’m just not ready. It’ll be up soon. I’ll twitter about it when it’s ready. In unrelated and pointless news, I drew some little link icons for the top of the right-side column so you can quickly link to stuff like Messenger at twitter and facebook. How useful!

Here’s hoping that everyone (who is an American) has a delicious Thanksgiving this week! I know I’m looking forward to it. :9

I hope everyone had an awesome Halloween weekend, whether you celebrate or not! I celebrated by making cupcakes and sharing with my family. :3

This week Aki is waking up. Again. Have you ever had one of those really vivid dreams where you just wake up with a gasp? I’m not sure it came through, but that’s the general idea behind what’s going on here. It’s such a strange physical feeling to wake up in the dark not totally sure where you are, I wasn’t completely sure how to convey that in pictures.

As I noted in my last entry, I have enough of a buffer set up for the comic to run every Monday through the rest of November, so I guess that makes Monday the new regular update day. I have a couple of extra pages set up to run as well, although they are more of a surprise. (And to help push the story along…) If you follow Messenger on Twitter or Livejournal, you’ll hear about them right away! There’s also the RSS feed right on the site, if you’re into that kind of thing. There’s also the new Facebook page where you can list yourself as a fan and get your updates right in your news feed!

One of the cast of Messenger made a special guest appearance in Slightly Damned this week! See if you can spot her! SD is a great fantasy comic made by one of my hive buddies, Chu! It’s cute and funny, and the art is fantastic. You should check it out!

Voting! It’s the beginning of the month, and Messenger is already coming in strong at TopWebComics! We moved up about 500 places into the 200s, which is fantastic! Let’s keep climbing and go for a spot in the top 100! Realistically, I know I probably won’t ever get much higher than that, but it’s a great feeling to make even this much progress. Help out by voting at TWC! There are new vote incentives for all of this month, which I’ll try to announce on Twitter to remind everyone. The “theme” for the next few incentive graphics are some of my “behind the scenes” work. I’ve been working on a new way of coloring lately, so I’m posting some of my experiments with that. Vote to check it out!

I’ve also been thinking about doing a little commentary on each page as I post it, but I’m not sure. I like the idea of talking about things as I make them, but I don’t want it to turn into a whine-fest about everything I think is wrong with it.

That’s all for now!

I also don’t think I mentioned it when I put it together, but I’ve also made a Facebook page for the comic, so you can add yourself as a fan if you’d like.

In addition to the technical stuff, I’ve also been working to add in some of the stuff that got lost from the site a couple of years ago when it was hacked. One thing I’ve been meaning to add was the Story Guide, which is basically just a running summary of the story so far in case you missed a detail from earlier on. The story is getting longer and longer all the time, and for something that only updates once a week you might need the occasional refresher.

That’s all for now!