2024 year in review! holy dang!
Hi babes!
There’s not technically a new newsletter this week… listen, we know we just started this thing, and maybe doing that right in the middle of the holidays wasn’t the best idea. HINDSIGHT and all. Anyway! The newsletter will be back in full force in a couple weeks to kick off 2025, but for now we’re trying to actually rest and recover from a heck of a year (we’re very bad at resting, but if we don’t practice how will we ever become world resting federation champions?). And we’re kicking off this “resting” by… still writing this "mini" newsletter.
Listen, we told you we were bad at it…
Anyway! Here’s just a quick recap of 2024 in Bridges ladies-land!
January 16 – We break an idea for a new pilot that we’re absolutely in love with!
February 19 – We’ve got the new pilot outlined and are ready to begin scripting. We will, however, not get to it for the remainder of the year. It stalls here due to our re-wedding planning, and then… well, read on.
March 21 – Our first Monster High episode, Two-riffic, airs! (we began work on this in July of 2022, animation is SLOW). It’s the last part of a four-part “spring break” arc, in the second season of the show! It was very intimidating to come in on an episode like that, especially since the show hadn’t even started airing when we wrote this. We had no idea what the characters would really look or sound like!
March 22 – Season two of Star Trek Prodigy premieres! We consulted on the entire season… you may have noticed a very intentional trans allegory going on with Zero (we did this consulting in July of 2021, animation is S L O W)!
March 23 – We had our big re-wedding because our first one sucked and so we could have one with the real Tilly!
March 27 – The Federation/Klingon war supplement for the Star Trek Adventures TTRPG is released! We wrote eight of the mission briefs in the book back in 2023!
Quick note that March 27 is our actual wedding anniversary, but as it fell mid-week we did our re-wedding the week before. But that was a really big week for us: our first produced tv writing credit when our first episode of tv released, official work on a Star Trek show, and a mega anniversary/re-wedding party! It was bananas.
First week of April – Negotiations finish and we receive and sign two graphic novel contracts! With two different publishers! And it happens in the same week? How?? It’s baffling, but exciting!
April – August – a mad dash round robin of writing one graphic novel script chapter, then flipping to the other book, then flipping back again, with revisions and editor notes mixed in. It’s hectic and frantic and exhausting but really, really fun.
May 22 – We get an official pass on a comic project we’d pitched to an editor and been discussing for a year. Sad, but these things happen. That’s the writer life.
August 8 – The second edition rulebook for Modiphius’ Star Trek Adventures TTRPG is released! We wrote eight in-universe character sidebars (back in 2023) that are used for extra Trek flavor throughout the book. It was so amazing to get to write for so many characters we love, even if it’s really hard to keep each of them to only one hundred words!
August 26 – We wrap the script for one of our graphic novels, at least until the art is complete and we do the lettering revision. 128 comic pages (223 script pages). This is still entirely under NDA and has not been announced, and we can’t tell you a single thing about it, except that it is Decidedly Cool. But the art is amazing so far, and it fills our hearts with such joy. Can’t wait to tell you about it! It’s probably looking at a 2026 release.
September 28 – We get invited to contribute to another Star Trek Adventures game supplement!
October 8 – Our second Monster High episode, Oh Rats, premieres. It’s a stand-alone episode that is very very us, and the vast majority of what you see is stuff that made it all the way through every draft and revision. That’s really rare.
October 9 – We meet with a producer about a short film we wrote, and she flips for the idea (complimentary). She wants to make it!
October 21 – Our four-part Monster High Halloween special, Monster Fest, debuts! We wrote all four parts and got to introduce Phoenix, a trans woman. It meant so much to us and while this one changed a lot through revisions, we really love how it came out.
October 28 – We break a new pilot script based on an idea we’ve had rattling around for years, but this was the first chance we had to sit down and brainstorm how to execute it.
November 11 – We wrap the script for our second graphic novel (again, until the art is done and we do the lettering revision). This one also hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re allowed to say it’s a YA queer trans romcom from Mad Cave! 199 pages (351 script pages)!
November 22 – We turn in our next batch of contributions for a Modiphius Star Trek Adventures game supplement (the one we were asked to work on back in September). These were written around all of our other stuff somewhere between Sept 28 and now! Not allowed to say what the supplement is just yet, but it should be out in 2025.
December 2 – Our original pilot script Robo Waitress Assassins makes it onto The Stunt List’s Originals Bureau of the hottest original scripts floating around Hollywood looking for buyers!
December 6 – The Astoundingly Awesome Tales supplement is released for Modiphius’ Fallout ttrpg. There’s five adventures included, one of which is ours: The Raider Base of Your Dreams. And they used our adventure for the cover art! So cool. We wrote this waaaaay back in October of 2022, but there were a lot of staff changes behind the scenes that meant extra delays.
December 10 – Our Monster Fest Halloween special for Monster High wins an inaugural Velma Award for LGBTQIA+ representation in children’s media! So damn cool, and an absolute honor.
December 10 – We get a chance to pitch a literal dream project we never ever thought we’d have the chance to do. We then spent a week tweaking and revising a more formal pitch, sent it to the editor, got notes back, and will be revising it again. The editor hopes to take it to the decision makers and really wants to convince them to greenlight it. It’s a huge swing of a concept, but our entire hearts are baked into it. Cross all your fingers and toes for us please!
December 16 – A comic editor reaches out to ask if we have a pitch in a particular genre she’s looking for. As it so happens, we do… the pilot idea we broke back in January but still haven’t had time to script. It would totally work as a comic, and she loves the quick pitch! We’ll be developing it into a full comic pitch to send over in January for her to try to get a greenlight on. You can cross your fingers for this one too (if you love us)!
December 20 – We meet with the producers for the potential short film we’re making, discuss the production plan and everything we need to set it in motion. We’re going to direct it! Ahhhhhh!
In the middle of all that, we’ve got two audio series pitches with a producer and big production company we’re waiting to hear back on (lots of changing of executives at the production company means lots of delays), and there’s a TV production company that read and loved Robo Waitress Assassins that we’re hopefully getting a meeting with in the new year. They’re not looking to pick up RWA, they just want to get to know us as writers (this is common). And that’d be great because we loooooove the stuff they’re making and would kill to work with them.
And in the middle of all that, each of us wrote two episodes for our podcasting company’s longest-running and most popular show, The Kingery (it’s a mobsters in space dramedy in its thirteenth season!), and Tilly showruns it and oversees all scripts, revisions, and production, as well as overseeing production on all of our other presently running shows… Genesis Avalon: Patriot, The Pendant Shakespeare, The Writers Block, and Tilly’s Trans Tuesdays.
Speaking of Trans Tuesdays, in the middle of everything else above, Tilly wrote and released forty-six essays on trans issues this year (and the accompanying forty-six podcast episodes). That’s 125,895 words, and a podcast runtime of 28 hours, 12 minutes, and 52 seconds!
You might say… we’ve been busy. 😳
And it only took like two hours to compile and write all of this for our yearly wrap-up, which is… this is resting, right? This is how you do it?
Eh, can’t stop won’t stop.
It’s important to note that all of the work mentioned above does not even come close to paying the bills. Throughout all of this, Susan worked full time with no paid time off of any kind. Tilly spent two hours a day, every weekday (except the summer), driving the kid to and from school. We all do what we have to do and there’s no shame in that. Creatives need support, everywhere, because the sad truth is that society doesn’t value creative work the way that it should.
That doesn’t mean we’re not grateful for what we have, because we are. We have had so many amazing opportunities and we’re excited to do more.
May 2025 bring so much more of the same (and us getting staffed on a TV show finally! Please!).
Happy holidays! Celebrate the new year! Rest up, we’re gonna need extra energy for whatever next year brings.
Stay safe. Love freely and without limits.
Do good where you can.
All our love.
