Happy International Women's Day! Our celebration is a little muted while most of the Outland Team is at Planet Comicon in Kansas City, MO today (Booth1827!), but in the meantime, we're honoring some of the many amazing women who contribute to our work at Outland Entertainment here on the blog.
For the past two years, author C.G. Volars and I have celebrated #IntergalacticWomensDay on our social media, posting about women in science fiction, in honor of her book Static over Space: Gravity and Lies being published on March 8, 2022. This year, I wanted to highlight especially women who have projects coming out this year with Outland!
The Insiders
I am so lucky to have some amazing women I collaborate with behind the scenes on Team Outland!
You may not see her byline (yet) on the covers of any of our projects, but Emmeryn “Em” Palladino, known online as GamemakerM, has her editorial fingers in so many Outland projects! She has always been interested in telling compelling stories. To that end she earned her BFA in Game Design and MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and Manhattanville, respectively. When she isn’t proofing, editing or designing for Outland, Em can be found playing tabletop games, designing her own little games (some of which can be found at gamemakerm.itch.io), or working on her debut novel series about fantasy disaster lesbians. Trans rights!
Angie Dreher-Bayman and Michelle Dreher, also known as The Dreher Sisters and the authors behind Outland's first picture book, Monster of the Celadon Sea, are integral members of our team! Angie works as our Project Manager, handling everything from picture book design and marketing to Kickstarter communications. Michelle, officially an Advisor, keeps Outland on track, with our company goals and mission in mind for any project we tackle. Both of these women are not only writers, but amazingly talented artists, running their own letterpress company, Two Tone Press. (Both Angie and Michelle are at Planet Comicon this weekend! If you're there, go say hi!)
I'm not here to toot my own horn, but lest I get in trouble with Em for leaving myself out, I'm Alana Joli Abbott, Editor in Chief at Outland, and the co-editor of several of our anthologies. You can find out more about me and my work on my website. Moving on!
Our Creators
We're tremendously lucky to have so many amazing women creators we collaborate with at Outland Entertainment! This year, we're publishing two wonderful anthologies that came to us curated by their editors. Lauren T. Davila is the editor of To Root Somewhere Beautiful, which officially released this month. Lauren also brought us her anthology When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead, which originally came out in the UK through Haunt Publishing. We're tickled with how the US edition came out (and how nice the two books look together)! She's the editor of several anthologies with other publishers, as well, and you can check out her website to learn more about her current and future projects.
May Seleste is the creator and editor of Haunted Hallways, which comes out soon! This collection of stories from Asian voices explores an elite private school in England, and the ghosts (both real and metaphorical) that haunt the students and faculty. Both of these editors brought many talented voices to their collections, and I'm so excited for you to read the stories they chose!
Among our forthcoming novels, Shannon Page's The Empress and The Moon, the fourth and final book in her Nightcraft Quartet, comes out this spring, and we think readers will be eager to see how this saga resolves. Featuring Callie, a witch scientist, her golem, her baby daughter, and a host of powerful witches, this series is perfect for celebrating International Women's Day. Shannon is also the co-author of the award-winning Our Lady of the Islands with Jay Lake, as well as an editor and the author of several other novels and a book of essays, which you can find on her home page.
Kate Martin's third novel in the Myst and Labyrnths series, The Silent One, comes out later this year as well. A reinvention of stories about immortals and demons in a world where the creator has gone missing, the series immerses readers in its gothic setting. In addition to her Outland novels, Kate is one of my favorite Instagram follows—she offers great writing advice and insight into the writing life!
In comics, Allison Pang and Irma "Aimo" Ahmed are the creators behind Fox & Willow, the story of a runaway princess and a fox spirit, whose adventures run them straight into encounters with other fairy tale characters. But because Allison and Aimo set the stories against a different backdrop, readers might not recognize them at first, which means that the spin on Rapunzel or the Little Mermaid never distracts from the larger story being told. Look for the volume four Kickstarter later this year! Allison is also the author of the the "Ironheart Chronicles" and the Abby Sinclair series. Find out more about both creators at their joint website Sad Sausage Dogs.
At Outland, we're huge fans of playing games, and we're excited to have two fantastic card-based games coming out this year! The first, Negocios Infernales, is a role playing game driven by an oracle-like Deck of Destiny, co-designed by World Fantasy Award winning novelist C.S.E. Cooney. (Her husband and co-designer, Carlos Hernandez, is right there behind her.) Her short stories have also been featured in Outland's Where the Veil Is Thin and Bridge to Elsewhere, and you can find many more of her amazing stories and novels at her website.
D.W. Vogel, author and worldbuilder for Outland's Nightfell series, including her novel The Risen, is also one of the brains behind the forthcoming, family-friendly card game, Cupcake Dragon, which is set to hit Kickstarter soon! Co-designed with Drew Vogel, the game focuses on players acquiring the most loot to attract a dragon to their town. Barnyard animals and delicious cupcakes are featured in the adorable artwork by Aaron Palsmeier. The game even inspired a picture book of the same name! You can also check out her other work, featuring dinosaurs and goddesses, at her website.
The featured image for this post is one of Outland's early anthologies, Hath No Fury, edited by the amazing Melanie Meadors. For another great tile for International Women's Day, check out Ladyhoppers, by Sarah Thérèse Pelletier and Scott James Taylor, a women centered buddy comedy about traveling the multiverse!