Microfiction & Vulpofiction
By:
March 29, 2010
There is no new Magister Ludi contest this week. HiLobrow.com is afluster with Edwardian foreboding and so it shall remain until 5pm EST on the 31st March, when the judges of the Radium Age Apocalypse microfiction contest will enter their subterranean command post, pull shut the squeaky iron hatch and begin teasing some kind of blueprint for societal hope fom the submitted fragments.
Which submitted fragments, by the way, are going to make for some difficult deliberation. Rubber uniforms; rabbit blood; Fordian Doom. Lloyd George; Death By Cows; Tesla’s tinkering. Can you sculpt a story-in-miniature that rubs scientifically fictive shoulders with these splendid examples? Simply read the guidelines, apply mind and pen, and then add the result as a comment to the end of the original post. Come April, if you are crowned Victor Ludi, you may find your name cropping up on the front page of HiLobrow.com, in a “Parallel Universe: Pazzo” podcast and on a padded envelope that contains a HiLobrow t-shirt.
Before you look at your pocket watch, gasp at doomsday’s imminence and then begin summmoning your interbellum sci-fi muse with a twiddle of your moustaches, I’d like to pay tribute to an author and a novel. The author is my countryman James Parker and the novel is The Ballad of Cocky The Fox. Parker is a ringmaster who whips ideas and words into a brilliant circus act. I have read many of his non-fiction pieces; I adore his voice, his vision and his obtusely acute angles. Like many, I have been waiting for him to craft fiction with these tools. And now that time has come. I hope. If we can raise the last $800 of the required $4000 funding, Parker will bring Cocky the Fox to life in 20 installments, aided by the illustrational talents of his wife, Kristin.
Please consider throwing a farthing or two at this worthy literary cause. You will be a happier reader for it. And the more you donate, the more exclusive rewards you can reap: a printed version of the novel; a public acknowledgment of your beneficence therein; a regular compendium of the vulpine and the Londinian compiled by me; a limited edition of a Cocky print; a Parkerian poem; and so on. To read, watch and hear a full account of this endeavour, visit the Cocky Kickstarter page. And if that doesn’t inspire you to click your way quickly to a donation, then I’m President Makonnen Woldemikael Gudessa of the United States of Africa.