Issue 36: The Wondercon screening, Star Trek Celebrations, and Tilly teaches writing!
Gosh so much has happened.
It was good stuff!
Which is nice when the world is so bad.
NEW STUFF
Just three days ago, we had our Robo Waitress Assassins pilot live reading/performance in the Joy Who Lived festival! But this newsletter is already long enough (so much has happened in such a short time!), so we’re gonna talk about that in the next issue.
But! We will let you know that the livestream will be viewable through April 30, and tickets are still available! So if you missed it, check it out, because it was amazing! (there is an audio issue early on, but it gets resolved quickly).
Zeffy
So! Exactly one week before the Robo Waitress Assassins live show, we had our Long Away screening and panel at WonderCon! You can see all our beautiful faces in the top image of this newsletter.
We initially thought the screening would be in a normal panel room, which usually has a screen and projector for people to show photos, slideshows, or short videos on. So we thought we’d just hook Tilly’s laptop to that with an HDMI cable and that would be that. But no. Oh no. They made it super official and put us in their big room for big stuff.
The panel before us was full of very famous voice actors, and after us there was a Jaws 50th anniversary panel right after us. Anybody ever heard of that movie? Pretty small film, probably not. Anyway, look at the size of this room!
We actually had to stop in early that Sunday morning to do our tech check for the show, and be sure the video file we brought played correctly on their equipment. We had the film on both an external hard drive and Tilly’s laptop, and our lead producer Dr. Erin Macdonald also brought a copy. Just so we had backups in case other methods didn’t work!
That large cardboard envelope Tilly’s carrying above was an exclusive, one of a kind poster we made to promote this screening and panel… it’s the normal poster for the film, with all the WonderCon details on it.
We had the entire panel sign it, and gave it away to a member of the audience! Unfortunately we didn’t remember to get a photo of the signed poster, because we’re dinguses, and now we’re kicking ourselves for it. Bah.
As the film screened, we were all offstage behind a curtain, right under one of the two large screens, where the film played directly above us.
We all stood there as the movie played, and this was the first time we got to watch our actors watch the film. We were all at the cast and crew screening almost a year ago, but it was in a theater and we were all watching the screen.
Here we got to watch them as they saw and reacted to their brilliant work, and that was a special kind of magic.
Here’s some more photos taken by people in the audience!
That photographer you see in the foreground of one of the above shots was the official WonderCon photographer. We don’t know if/when we’ll get to see any of his photos, it seems the con just photographs and records everything in this room (we’ve been told they keep it all for archival purposes).
We were told we will get the video from this panel, though we don’t know when. As soon as we have it we’ll link you to it, and you can watch!
It was the most amazing panel experience we’ve ever had.
Musings of a Middle Aged Geek did a WonderCon recap, and mentioned our screening as part of it! Several of the photos above were taken by the author, and we found him on social media and thanked him for coming… when he told us it was the highlight of his con! Wow. Dang.
Here’s a reminder that Tilly’s teaching a pilot writing and pitching class as part of the Joy Who Lived festival, just over a week from now! If you’re in Los Angeles and are trans/nonbinary/gender nonconforming, come on out and learn from our experience!
Also the official Joy Who Lived blog did a little writeup on us and Robo Waitress Assassins before the show, if you wanna check that out, do!
the Moon Houston
The Locutors of Trek podcast did a lovely review of Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming issues 3-5, which you can find here.
And the Continuing Conversations Trek podcast had us on to discuss Homecoming, too! Small note for this one that it was recorded several months ago, before the series had completed releasing, so we had to speak a little more generally so as to not spoil anything.
We were also asked to contribute an essay on the history of LGBTQIA+ people in Star Trek for this year’s Star Trek Celebrations Pride month special one-shot from IDW! Final order cutoff is April 20, so tell your comic shop to order one for you!
Annnnnd to wrap this section up with more preorder stuff, a reminder that preorders make or break books, and we have two you can preorder right now!
Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming, the complete series collected in a trade paperback!
Terry Austin
And our YA queer trans romcom, Just Another Summer, available in paperback and hardcover!
WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON
We’re very much in recovery mode, after WonderCon and Robo Waitress Assassins, but there’s a little bit to talk about…
The first being that we now have a literary agent! A kind friend introduced us, thinking we’d be a great fit, and it turns out we were. They totally get who we are as writers, and loved a few graphic novel proposals we sent over, and offered to officially represent us!
They don’t do much work in the direct market (the monthly comics you find in comic stores), but mostly sell graphic novels and prose direct to book publishers. So we’ve had to review the contract and ask questions, have some meetings, etc. And now we’re prepping all the materials they’ll need to take our first pitch out and shop it to publishers. So that’s exciting! There are no guarantees, of course, but this gives us a far greater chance of getting more books out there than we could on our own.
And the other thing we have to report is that there’s nothing to report on the new pilot we’ve been working on, because: we scrapped it.
It sucks but sometimes it happens, something is just not working and it’s time to let it go. We’ll talk about that in more detail in the Process Stuff section of the paid version of this newsletter issue!
Tilly Bridges
TRANS TUESDAY UPDATE
We interviewed author Alex Ritany about their new novel, Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Know, which is a queer trans body swap time loop story! It’s just as bananas as it sounds, and is surprisingly also a great way for cis people to understand what dysphoria is like for trans people.
Tilly Bridges
And then we had NO ESCAPE 2: SOME ESCAPE (due to cis allyship) about a truly awful experience Tilly went through, experiencing constant deadnaming and misgendering from medical professionals during a procedure… and how one cis doctor took it upon herself to make things better.
Tilly Bridges
RECOMMENDATIONS
For All Mankind is back, and we couldn’t be happier. It’s one of our favorite shows, a really "realistic" sci-fi show that began with the premise: what if Russia beat the United States to the moon? The show posits the space race would have thus continued. Given the technological and societal advancements spurred by space exploration, it looks at how the world would have changed and what major events we know might have gone differently.
Each season jumps a decade in time, so while the first season took place in the 1960s, we’re now into the alternate early-2000s, and Earth already has a jointly run (and highly problematic) colony on Mars.
It’s got amazing characters and fabulous writing, and there is perhaps no better media that shows just how much space really wants to fucking kill you. It often has the tensest scenes of shit going wrong in space, and it’s so so good.
THE DIRTBAG DISPATCH
Henry is emo. He’s so emo. We’ve mentioned this a lot, probably. He often doesn’t drink enough, so we’ve had to try differently shaped bowls to find one that encouraged him to drink more.
But at the same time, Henry is so emo. So if we just swapped out a water bowl, and he didn’t like the new one, he’d simply not drink at all ever again.
He does this with his food constantly! He will suddenly decide he doesn’t like his food, and just stop eating and starve himself until we figure it out and switch it to something he’s decided he likes now. He was even like this as a super young kitten, when we first got him and he was a pound underweight (which is a LOT for a three pound kitten) because he didn’t like the food they were giving him and chose to just starve instead. He’s a constant project.
But! We lucked out and that new, wider, shallow blue bowl in the photo seems to have met with his approval (for now), and he’s drinking a lot more than he used to. Hooray.
Izzy, meanwhile, wants you to know she loves these flip flops. A lot. She often puts some of her toys inside them to then fish them out again, and if you zoom in and look you will see just so many teeth holes in them from when she continually gnawed on them as a baby. They’re just her fave.
WHAT’S IN THE BIG TIME?
Big Time issue 36 gets into having to scrap a project, and how to tell the difference between when something needs a revision and when it’s just time to move on from it. It’s also got the final piece of exclusive character concept art from one of our sci-fi comic pitches!
Sign up for it at birdguestbroadcast.com and help us pay rent and eat food and stuff!
THE END
Live shows are cool.
Panels about our art are cool.
Wait, are… are we cool?! Highly unlikely.
SOCIALS
