For those of you reading on the site itself, you might notice the first bit of news: ashearmstrong.com is now mine. I upgraded my wordpress account. Yes, I could’ve gone ahead and set up my own site via hostgator or one of those but honestly, this was the least stressful option and it works just fine. I can fully decorate the site now and I have the domain name. That’s some good stuff.

Secondly, the Indiegogo campaign is over and finished out with a total of $987, just barely shy of half my intended goal. But that’s okay, I can more than work with that thanks to some awesome folks. That grand total is all thanks to a last minute backer who took the highest reward tier, the $300 Governor, which means that he gets to name not only the governor of New Gilead but also the name of the capital city. Very cool and very appreciated.

Moving forward, I’ll be finishing up the edits on the last chapter of Demon Haunted and then running through the rewritten second chapter one more time before declaring the second draft DONE and starting the process of getting this bad boy edited. Should be able to get all that done this week as chapter 19 is just waiting on me and I need to get some character names from a couple of backers.

Indiegogo says I’ll have my funds on Tuesday, and then I can slam down sweaty fistfuls of cash on Bob Kehl’s desk and get the art side of things started. This time around, I’ll have a full sleeve and I’ll be getting a character piece of Grimluk on top of that for promotional use and the second bookmark.

I’m hoping to have the last draft, and maybe even all the formatting and everything else done by the end of August. If everything goes smoothly, I’ll put up a pre-order for the Kindle version on September 1st and release print and digital on October 1st. Should be a good Orctober celebration this year.

And even though it was WAY early, I snagged the Halloween slot for r/Fantasy’s Writer of the Day, so that should be fun. I’ll figure out what all I’ll do in celebration once it gets closer and for those who prefer to stay away from reddit, I’ll have all my other avenues of social media open as usual.

Beyond that, I have a couple of ideas for blog posts I may do soon and if anyone’s interested, I’m thinking about doing a Ghostbusters franchise retrospective leading up to the release of the reboot in July. I’d cover the movies, the cartoons, the main IDW comic series, and the 2008 video game. Let me know what you think about that.

I think that’s everything for now. There will be art updates as they come though the Indiegogo backers will get everything first. Take care y’all!