Issue 17: a book birthday, and new animation!

How is it time for another newsletter already?

Didn’t we just do one of these?

What do you mean time keeps endlessly progressing forward, destroying all in its path as the universe slowly returns to total entropy?!

NEW STUFF

Hey, look at that main image! It’s a blast from the past, why the heck is it here? Well (thank you for asking), it’s because Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix just passed its two-year anniversary! It released on June 27, 2023, and dang how time flies.

Tilly’s got several more non-fiction books planned, but the market is tough for trans books, especially without an agent who specializes in non-fiction. If you know of one, hook ya girls up!

In any case, the response continues to be overwhelming and heartwarming, and that it’s touched so many people has meant an awful lot.

Okay so, as it’s all nice and official now, contracts received and signed, we’re delighted to tell you that the thing we asked you to cross your fingers for in the last newsletter is that we’re writing an episode for an upcoming brand new animated show!

Not sure that we’re allowed to say what it is yet, but trust we will yell it at you with gusto as soon as we get the all clear.

As is common in animation, it’s a freelance episode, meaning we were hired to write just this one episode and aren’t on the writing staff or anything. Most animated shows work this way, though the recent negotiations between TAG (The Animation Guild) and the studios specify all new shows (that meet a set of criteria) must actually have at least two writers on staff.

Which means a weekly salary for the length the writer’s room runs, and that’s considerably more money than one script’s fees tally up to. So that’s great!

But of course there are always loopholes. We know of an animation writer who wrote six freelance episodes for a show, and then they hired her on staff. Which would be amazing, but for whatever reason staff writers on that show don’t get script fees. Which meant if she took the job on the writing staff and wrote just as many episodes, she’d actually be making less money than even six times the paltry freelance script fee gets you.

Isn’t capitalism wonderful?

In any case, we’re very excited to have this gig working for two very cool ladies whose work we really dig. Hopefully we do a good job and it gets us more episodes down the line!

WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON

Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming still takes up most of our present bandwidth. We just turned in the script to issue 4, and have started on the page by page outline for issue 5.

That’s not something the publisher asked for, mind you. IDW and Paramount wanted to see and approve the full outline for the series, which was an issue by issue breakdown of the full story. Beyond that, they just want to see and approve the scripts.

But we need page by page outlines for comics, and we’ll go into why we do that extra work nobody asked us to do in the paid version of this week’s newsletter.

Ooh! Are you not enticed? Listen, we need money to live, don’t diss the hustle.

We also turned in a brief outline for a graphic novel we were asked to pitch on (this isn’t a new project, we’ve mentioned being asked to pitch for this in previous newsletters). The editor will take that and the one-page pitch we did to The Deciders to get the official greenlight and then it’s contract time. We’ll see what happens!

Our new animation script has a meeting set to break the episode (basically brainstorm the story with the head writer and showrunner), and then we’ll be off to outline and script on that, too.

San Diego Comic-Con is coming up at the end of July, and that always throws a huge wrench into our schedules, because no writing is getting done that week. So we’re trying to shift everything around it and be sure we still hit our deadlines (‘cause the Bridges ladies do not. miss. deadlines.)

Our official SDCC signing and panel schedule will be in the next newsletter, so keep an eye out for it, and if you’ll be at the con, you should definitely come see us!

TRANS TUESDAY UPDATE

We did an essay and podcast episode on a topic that really shouldn’t need to even be talked about, and yet it does because some folks have bought into propaganda or are willfully ignorant. So read along and learn WHY IS THERE NO CIS PRIDE?

And then dive into THE PAST 2: THE NEW PAST to read about how the Paper Girls show, out of the blue, gave Tilly back a little piece of her lost childhood… even if it meant having to find herself in someone who was merely close to who she might’ve been as a kid.

RECOMMENDATIONS

A recent fun discovery is…old? The Count of Monte Cristo is a lot of fun. Yes, it’s very long (maybe don’t look at how many pages) but the translation by Robin Buss comes highly recommended. There’s drama and danger and intrigue and secrets and you will learn a lot of information about Napoleon, but it’s really not boring. Really!

THE DIRTBAG DISPATCH

These two were definitely aware they were on opposite sides of the wall, and were playfully swatting around the doorframe at each other, yet both seemed stymied about how to actually get to each other.

And listen, Henry is a Certified Dingus so it’s perfectly believable that he’d have temporarily forgotten how doorways work. But Izzy? She’s so smart!

Mostly.

But then there’s times like this… and we worry the dingus-itude is catching.

WHAT’S IN THE BIG TIME?

Big Time issue 17 has exactly what we told you it would! Which is a breakdown of exactly what page by page outlines for comics are, and why we always do them, even when nobody asked us to and no one else will ever see them. (unless we include some here in the future! And maybe we WILL, what then?!)

And we’ve got page two of a black and white action thriller comic pitch, Bulletproof, that no publisher picked up and nobody else has ever seen!

Sign up for it at birdguestbroadcast.com and make us so happy!

THE END

The news is bad!

So try to make the world a little better if you can.

Today and every day.


SOCIALS
Tilly’s Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/tillybridges.bsky.social
Susan’s Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/susanlbridges.bsky.social
Writing website
http://birdguest.com