Omikuji: random fortunes written on strips of paper at Shinto shrines in Japan.
Literally “sacred lottery”, these are usually received by pulling one out randomly from a box that one shakes,hoping for the resulting fortune to be good. The omikuji falls out of a small hole, scrolled up.
The Book
For two years, Catherynne M. Valente has been sending stories out into the wild. Every month, for twenty-four months, a new tale has appeared in mailboxes all over the world.
Here, for the first time, these stories have been brought together in a single anthology. Two years of detectives, fairy tales, frost giants, lost moon colonies, furies and minotaurs. Two years of magic.
Accompanied by fantastical illustrations created by the subscribers of the project, these hitherto unpublished stories paint a landscape of fiction, family, and a new kind of connection between author and reader.
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The Project
The Omikuji Project is an experiment in cyberfunded art. It is an old-fashioned approach to new-founded literature, the shortest path from author to reader. It is a secret and marvelous communication, a unique way for you to read stories unavailable in any other venue, in any other way. It is a network of tales, a community. It is whispering in the dark; it is a fireside confession.
On the fifteenth of the month, subscribers will receive either a PDF or a mailed letter containing one short story or poem not less than two-thousand words or 150 lines, and any other literary flotsam I can find to send you. These stories are not published elsewhere without permission of the community, except in the collected anthologies, which occur every two years.
The mailing is the heart of the project: printed on high quality paper, autographed, and sealed with a scarlet wax stamp, they are stunning collectible artifacts.
I will continue this project so long as a minimum number of subscribers are interested (approximately 100).
Click below to be a part of the Omikuji Project (Note: Subscribers outside the US should email the author for international postage rates):
Subscribers will also have access to a dedicated Livejournal community and may, if they like, suggest subjects, characters, or structures for future stories. I deeply hope that a small community will form around these stories, and that my readers, extraordinary people that they are, can find each other and know each other through this hidden space, off the beaten road of traditional publishing.
You must subscribe by the 10th of any given month in order to receive that month’s story; late subscriptions will receive the next month’s offering. In order to cover costs, the mailing will be $10 a month, the PDF $5. If you wish to subscribe for a full year, a discounted rate of $100 for the mailings and $50 for the emails is avaiable.
If you enjoy a given month’s story, please feel free to use the automat or to upgrade to a mailing for that period for an additional $5. You subscription will not change permanantly unless you wish it to.
