GREETINGS FROM FERKELBURG

Krazines' World-Building Project

In celebration of Krazines' five-year anniversary in 2021, we are engaging in a 5-year world-building project to which you're invited to to join in a collaborative and creative endeavor to help us create the fictional hamlet of Ferkelburg (translation: Castle Piglet) through your visual art, comics, prose and poetry. The first step in this project is the January 2021 publication of our zine, Moss Piglet, which will introduce Ferkelburg to our readers.

About World-Building
For those unfamiliar with world-building, the term is often associated with the genres of science-fiction and fantasy; however, and particularly for this project, you should consider it as the art of everything. If your imagination leads you to create alien creatures, space ships, and castle ruins, that's great. If you're pulled more toward sketching or writing about the world around you, that's wonderful, too. Consistency between contributors is not important at this stage.

The website, well-storied, provides detailed information about world-building, and you may find it a great resource while creating art or a piece of writing for our publication.

What to Submit
If you're an urban sketcher, submit your urban sketches. The people and places shown in them will become the residents, parks, and buildings of Ferkelburg. If you like to paint flowers and trees, those elements of nature will grow well within our town. If you enjoy writing fiction, set in modern or ancient times, the times and related elements depicted in your tale will fit right into our narrative. In short, anything goes. You're free to engage in map-making, developing characters and environments, or contribute whatever you feel fits into our world.

You may wish to depict its lakes and rivers, trees and flowers, clothing, language, architecture (and building materials)*, wildlife, technology, infrastructure, languages and colloquialisms, public and private transportation, rules of society, ethnicity, ancestry, any predominant age groups or gender, social classes and culture, education, topography and terrain, roads and bridges, business and government, forms of currency and non-monetary exchange, generally accepted morals, the arts, upscale neighborhoods and downtrodden places, public figures, the founders of Ferkelburg and historic figures and events, the service industry, foods, tourist attractions, history and folklore, cemeteries, crime and punishment – prisons, jails, public flogging, and acts of public humiliation, means of communication –newspaper, radio, TV, letters/mail service, semaphore flag codes, the town square soapbox, newsletters, and social media – religions and customs, sports (the local team is the Water Bears), sources of discord and prejudice,

In the category of architecture alone, you may choose to draw or write scenes involving taverns, drug stores, cigar shops, record stores, 5&10 shops, diners, coffee houses, post office, police and fire stations, town hall, bordellos, bakeries, convenience stores, tattoo parlors, monuments, town square, salons and parlors, clubs, drug stores and candy shops, delicatessens, ethnic food and culture purveyors, shoes and clothing stores, gas stations, amusement parks, carnivals, hotels and motels, massage parlors, holistic and new age stores, mobile homes, houses of worship, pawnshops, scrap and junk yards, secondhand retailers, chicken coops, garages, shoe shines. and shoe repair.

When, Where and How to Submit Work
If you would like to submit work to our January 2021 issue, please send visual art, comics, prose and poetry by Wednesday, December 9, 2020 to info@krazines.com. You are invited to send questions and comments about this project or about our publication and other activities to us at this same address.

Visual art should be preferably in a vertical format and submitted in a high-resolution jpeg, TIFF, or PDF file. Work should be scalable to a 5.5 (w) x 8.5” page. Our printer requires high-resolution files of 300 dpi or higher. If you are taking a photo of your work with a smartphone camera, adjust your camera settings to its highest resolution. Do not crop the image with your camera's tools as this function will diminish the quality of your image. We can crop the image for you in Adobe Photoshop without loss of quality.

Written work should be submitted as a .doc, .docx, or PDF file. Prose pieces of about 350 words can fit on one page; however, you may submit multiple-page articles, stories, and poems, as well as provide multiple submissions. Krazines reserves the right to edit written work for space and clarity. Contributors may receive a copy of the January issue for $5.00, plus shipping. Additional copies are $10 each, plus shipping. Subscribers to Moss Piglet may submit work at no additional cost.

5-Year Project
Following publication of the January 2021 issue, Krazines will post invitations or progress reports on our development of Ferkelburg. While we cannot anticipate how this project may grow, we hope it generates interest and participation to sustain it.

We hope over the next five years to grow this project not only into more zine publications, but also into other print products - postcards, greeting cards, and letters you can receive in the mail - as well as buttons and pins, a website to share your work with an online audience, and more.

By our 10th anniversary in 2026, we hope to host a cosplay event, making our world come to life, and/or develop a tabletop RPG (role-playing game) about Ferkelburg, or assemble other activities or events around our collaboratively-constructed locale.

World-Building Examples
​When putting pen, pencil or brush to paper or typing stories on a typewriter or computer program and seeking inspiration, you may wish to consider the depth found in other fictional places: Lake Wobegon, Winesburg, Ohio, Grover's Corners, Spoon River Anthology, Hogsmeade and HogwartsSchool, Willy Wonka's Factory, Oz and the Emerald City, the Shire and Rivendell, Gotham City, Neverland, Narnia, Kings Landing and Winterfell (from Game of Thrones), South Park, Pandora (from the movie, Avatar), Lilliput, Jurassic Park, Bikini Bottom (from SpongeBob SquarePants), Springfield (from the Simpsons), Yoknapatawpha (William Faulkner's novels and stories.)

Like the police box-shaped, time-traveling Tardis from the Doctor Who series, Ferkelburg is a lot bigger on the inside than it would appear to someone who is seeing our hamlet from a distance.

Questions or Comments
If you have any questions or comments on this world-building project, please send them to us at info@krazines.com. We would love to hear from you.