Guest Post: There’s a Dragon in My Cupcake!

Dragons love two things: Sleeping on huge piles of treasure, and eating delicious treats… Especially cupcakes! Frosted… Chocolate… Cupcakes…

I love a fun game that I can play with my family, and I love it all the more if there is cute artwork. Cupcake Dragon is exactly that sort of game, where players compete to see who can entice a dragon to come live in and protect their village. Alana Joli Abbott from Outland Entertainment is here to tell us all about this new project, and shares the story of how she and Jeremy Mohler turned the game idea into a companion picture book!

There’s a Dragon in My Cupcake, by Alana Joli Abbott

It started with a dragon.

Scratch that. It might have started with a cupcake. By the time it got to me, both dragons and cupcakes were involved—as well as assorted barnyard creatures, and two brave daughters ready to defend their parents’ bakery. What I know for sure about the origins of the picture book titled Cupcake Dragon is that they lie within the game of the same title. While I haven’t had a chance to win the game yet, I do feel like I won a prize in getting to work on this very cool picture book project for Outland Entertainment.

The idea for both came from game designers Drew Vogel and D.W. Vogel (who is also a talented SF writer, and the author of The Risen, for which I served as her developmental editor). They wanted to create a card game for families, something with great, kid-friendly art, simple enough gameplay for children in the mid-elementary grades, and the type of competitive humor that would keep families all entertained. Their idea was for players to amass enough treasure that they could attract a dragon—thus, the player with the biggest hoard would also get the dragon, becoming the game’s winner. Suits within the game are four farmyard animals. And wild Cupcake Cards allow players to take a whole stockpile of loot (as well as changing the suit of the game play).

Here’s where my recollection gets blurry. I don’t know if Aaron Palsmeier’s art started to come in, thus inspiring Outland’s Publisher Jeremy Mohler to pitch an outline for a picture book, or if Jeremy’s idea for a story based on the game arose before he even saw Aaron’s art. What I do know is that I got an outline for a book in my inbox, with a note that said something like, “Can we turn this into a picture book?”

As Outland’s Editor in Chief, I’ve worked on a lot of projects, most of them for grown-ups. I read a lot of picture books. I review a lot of picture books. But I’d never written or edited one before. Outland had another picture book in progress at the time—Monster of the Celadon Sea, by the Dreher Sisters, which has since been released—but we’d never published one. It was new territory for everyone involved. And new territory like that requires a very collaborative environment.

The story is this: a bunch of anthropomorphic wolf bandits go on a rampage, stealing a bakery’s famous cupcakes every morning. The baker’s daughters decide they’ll get help from the only creature who can stop the bandits: the local dragon who lives up the mountain from the village. Only, they’re not sure how they can entice the dragon to help them. What should they bring? Of course, given the title, neither adults nor young readers will have a hard time guessing! But we hope that they’ll enjoy seeing how the two daughters get to the same conclusion.

I’ve interviewed many picture book authors and illustrators about the process of how picture books go through traditional publishing channels. Oftentimes, there’s very little collaboration between the author and the artist; it’s channeled through an art director and an editor, as well as perhaps a marketing department. What was exciting about working on this picture book in a small, independent house is that all of us had our fingers in the story. The Vogels looked at the script and gave us feedback (as well as suggesting animal noises in the word bubbles). Aaron sent thumbnails and character designs, which we went back and forth on until getting things just so. Angie Dreher-Bayman, the book’s designer, steered us from the beginning with her opinions on what makes a picture book a good story—and both Angie and the Vogels made sure to remind us that the intended audience for the book should be those mid-elementary readers who’d also be playing the game.

We went through many drafts until getting the text ready for layout on Aaron’s gorgeous illustrations, and then we went through more tweaks so that the text would fit on the pages exactly how we wanted them to appear. Angie’s work designing the text, with a different size and color for the dragon’s dialog, enhances the piece and makes it more fun to read.

And now, finally, we’re ready to collaborate with a new audience—our Kickstarter backers. Cupcake Dragon, both the book and the game, launched on Kickstarter on November 12, and we’re so excited to take the next steps on our journey with the backers (and bakers?) who join us! There will certainly be cupcakes.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, there will also be a few dragons.

Alana Joli Abbott is the Editor in Chief of Outland Entertainment, a regular contributor to Paste Magazine, and the author of Blackstone Academy for the Magical Arts, as well as other interactive novels with Choice of Games. For more about her adventures and her book mail, you can follow @alanajoli on Instagram.