Issue 19: disappearing books, film fests, and SDCC!

We are so tired.

Levels of exhaustion previously unexplored by humankind.

This is the true final frontier.

NEW STUFF

This newsletter has breaking news now? Seemingly so…

Yesterday (or Aug 12, the day before this newsletter went out if you’re reading it later), seventy-eight five-star reviews disappeared from Tilly’s book Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix on its Amazon listing, along with the digital and paperback formats (they also put it under a Harry Potter ad, for extra transphobic insult).

Even more distressing is that it stopped coming up in search results for a lot of people, and most distressing is that many people who bought the digital version on Kindle found that it had been deleted from their devices.

Tilly’s publisher has said this happened to “a lot” of their books and would be resolved soon, but was unable to provide a reason as to why (despite being asked three times), or being able to provide any assurance that the deleted Kindle copies and missing reviews and ratings would return.

The sad truth is that Amazon remains vital to a book’s success, and only in the past month did it finally reach the one hundred ratings threshold that causes it to get recommended to a lot more people. Not to mention it’s pretty rare for any book to have 103 five-star ratings, and that all the very personal reviews from people saying how much the book meant to them evaporated.

Hopefully by the time the next newsletter goes out this will have been resolved, but if your deleted digital copy does not return by then, please contact us. We’ll be happy to send you a pdf of the book, no questions asked.

Now on to happier news!

Long Away is an official selection of the Long Beach QFilm Fest! It’ll screen as part of the Queer & Trans Shorts Program on Saturday, September 6 at 1 PM! Tickets will be available here soon!

This will make it the official US premiere, and we’re so excited that it’s one we can actually attend! Hopefully a lot of the cast and crew can make it too, since most are local to Los Angeles. Come see our movie on a huge theater screen, and say hi! We’ll be there!

We’re back from SDCC, and it was another truly amazing experience. So let’s talk about the good:

Our panels went amazing! Truly lovely people came to see us, and we made fabulous connections. We reconnected with old friends we hardly ever get to see, and have new friends who are wonderful, creative, kind people. It’s always the best part of the overwhelming overload that is SDCC.

The signing we did with IDW was especially remarkable, because… our Voyager: Homecoming comic isn’t even out yet, so we figured very few people would have anything for us to sign.

But so many people wanted us to sign the SDCC Star Trek comic preview ashcan?! (an ashcan is a small, mini comic... these ones were given away free and contained one cover and two interior pages from our book). It was so surprising.

If you missed this, by the way, there’s a very limited quantity of them up in Tilly’s ko-fi shop if you want a signed one! Get it quick, there’s only a few of them.

What really surprised us, though, is that people brought other things for us to sign! And we don’t have that much work that’s been released yet… someone brought the cover to their Star Trek Prodigy blu-ray (or… soundtrack? unsure) and asked us to sign it, and was so curious about the consulting we did on the show.

Another couple of cuties brought over a copy of The Color of Always (that they said they’d just purchased when they saw we’d be at this signing?!) and had us sign the title page for the original comic version of Long Away (which of course has become the short film we wrote and directed). That’s the first time anyone ever asked us to sign that book, and it was really touching.

We also got to go to the DC mixer/party every night, which is one of the greatest things we’ve gotten to do. We went last year, too! Because uhhh that book we’re writing for them? We finished writing it a year ago! It’s the project we mentioned that just got pushed back to a 2027 release date.

We’ll tell you why it was pushed back eventually, it’s actually a pretty good reason and we’re not mad about it, but it is so hard to have to wait two more years! Ugh.

Tilly was also on a panel with Allison Bechdel (the Allison Bechdel, yes) who said she was honored to meet Tilly?! And asked about Begin Transmission (and has since ordered a copy!) and they gushed about how great the Wachowskis are for a while!

We also met with an editor who’s now waiting for pitches from us, and another high up editor at a big publisher introduced himself to us while we were waiting for our Trek signing. He’s a big Trek fan and was excited for our book, and gave us his card. And we’ve been so excited about Homecoming and working so hard on it, it completely slipped our minds that this book is high profile enough that a lot of people actually know about it and will read it. And that’s like a calling card for us as writers.

It’s all very surreal.

We also found this amazing, huge, lit-up scale model of Voyager on the con floor! We had to get a photo!

The downside to this year’s SDCC is that we didn’t get a hotel in the thunderdome that is the hotel lottery, for the first time ever. We were able to pick one up weeks later as people canceled, by watching the room availability page like hawks, but… it wasn’t close.

And the problem with that is time. Time time time.

We were the furthest shuttle stop from the convention center. It was a twenty minute walk just to get there, and then we’d often have to wait twenty to thirty minutes more for the shuttle to actually leave, and another thirty before we were back at the hotel!

On top of that, when our hotel was fully booked, during the busiest event in the city all year, our hotel decided it was the perfect time to renovate two of its three elevators.

So not only was there only one elevator for all people staying there, the staff had to use the same elevator. And we were on the sixth floor.

All of this combined to just eat away at our time, we easily lost 2-3 hours a day just waiting through all of that nonsense.

And that time had to come from somewhere, so… we didn’t make it to any of the after-parties this year, because we couldn’t stay at those late, and then have it take another hour and a half to get back to our hotel. We’d die of sleep deprivation due to how early we had to be up to get back to the convention center in time for morning panels and meetings.

You might think, “ah well, that’s too bad.” And yeah, sure, but… there are people at SDCC we only see at those parties. So many creatives and editors and publishers go to them, and that means missed opportunities to meet and connect. And that’s awful, especially when the con is but once a year and costs a small fortune to attend.

We’re still kinda pissed about it.

But the connections we did make were amazing, and are always the best part about SDCC. In fact, it’s the “process stuff” we’re going to talk about in the paid version of this issue of the newsletter, because it’s one hundo percento part of the job. But you can’t be weird about it! So sign up for that if you wanna know what the heck we’re talking about (only $5 a month! It helps us eat! Yay!).

Also! If you’re reading this it’s ‘cause you like us (aww yay!) so you might wanna see some of the press we did! Here’s what’s released so far, with more still to come:

Graphic Policy interview with Trek comic writers.

CBR interview with Trek comic writers.

IGN interview with Trek comic writers.

Strange New Pod coverage of the IDW Trek comics panel.

Screenrant coverage of the IDW Trek comics panel with some speculation about Homecoming. Twice. In two different ways.

 We also found out IDW made a preview trailer for issue 1 of Homecoming?! How cool is this!!

 
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t close this out by telling you Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming issue 2 is now available for pre-order! Hopefully your local comic shop is already pulling every issue for you, but here’s the official preview solicit!

WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON

Would you believe as soon as we were back from SDCC, we had to dive right back into writing? We took one day to recover, and even that put a lot of pressure on us to hit two different deadlines on two different things.

Exactly one week after we got back the first draft of our animation episode script was due, and one week after that the first draft of Homecoming issue 5 was due.

And hit those deadlines we did. The Bridges ladies don’t. miss. deadlines.

We’ll be waiting for notes and then doing revisions on both, and then we’ll see if anything new has popped up. If not, we have our independently produced sci-fi action comedy comic that needs its final issue scripted (we’ve been working on it for years, and it’s three quarters of the way drawn… it has a long saga we’ll talk about someday), and a new tv pilot that’s been outlined for almost a year and is still waiting for us to have time to script it. And we need to script the next short film we want to direct.

We’ll see where things take us!

TRANS TUESDAY UPDATE

We’ve been diving into the complicated issue of touch and the way it impacts trans people. It’s something Tilly struggled with all her life pre-transition, because every time anyone touched her body for any reason, it reminded her that her body wasn’t hers. Even while she felt entirely alone and lost and wanted to be close to people.

It’s something she’d seen a lot of trans and nonbinary people struggle with, so she ran a survey to look for commonalities and got a flood of responses. So check out TRANS TOUCH 1: PERSONAL EXPERIENCES (Tilly’s own struggles with it), and TRANS TOUCH 2: PLATONIC TOUCH AND HUGS (the first half of the survey results, with personal comments from respondents), and TRANS TOUCH 3: SEX AND BEING TOUCH-STARVED (this one is a pg13 discussion of thoughts about it, it's nothing explicit).

RECOMMENDATIONS

KPOP Demon Hunters is a ding dang delight. It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s got a great story, and the songs are a hundred times catchier than you'd think they could be. It’s really good, and if you don’t have at least two different songs stuck in your head by the time you finish watching… you’re made of stronger stuff than we are.

THE DIRTBAG DISPATCH

Leaving our feline babies behind during SDCC is always tough, because we love them, but also because Dirtbag Henry developed a bit of separation anxiety after being around us all the time during pandemic lockdown.

For the past couple years our kid didn’t want to go to SDCC, so he stayed home with them. But last year Henry got really upset and wouldn’t stop yowling and scratching and kept our kid up all night and was generally a total wreck.

So our kid decided this year he was gonna go with us (he seemed to have a good time, though we believe he largely wanted to go just so he didn’t have to deal with Henry again).

That meant we needed a cat-sitter, so enter our lovely friend Liz! She dropped by to feed and love on them while we were gone, and… Henry loved her? He let her pet his belly and didn’t immediately bite her? He went in her lap for cuddles?

WHO IS THIS CAT.

To be fair, Liz has magic cat powers, but still! He was, like… being an entire sweetie to her? While he’s routinely an asshole to us, who he still misses?

This cat has so many emotional problems. But he was happy and well cared-for, and that’s amazing!

This was the first time Izzy was ever without all of us since we got her last November, and we didn’t know how she’d react. But she’s the absolute sweetest little baby, so we didn’t foresee any problems.

But she’s also never had anyone other than us and our kid in the apartment with her before (we still have to be careful about covid, so we’ve had zero guests here since early 2020).

And there were no problems! Though we were surprised to discover Izzy was kind of skittish and less cuddly with Liz than she is with us, but again, she’s hasn’t been around any other humans in nine months, so it was all new to her.

Each of these two responded completely opposite to how we thought they would.

Cats! They’re never not… cats.

WHAT’S IN THE BIG TIME?

Big Time issue 19 talks about that thing we all hate, “networking,” and why that’s a bad thing to call it, but why it’s also important and how we’ve found success with it (spoiler: treat people like human beings).

And the exclusive page four of a black and white action thriller comic pitch, Bulletproof, that no one else has ever seen!

Sign up for it at birdguestbroadcast.com and help support us! It would make us so happy!

THE END

This newsletter was too long!

We’re trying to make them shorter, really.

It’s just that everything is so much.

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