Call for Submissions – New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan

Via booksthathelp

On March 11, 2011 a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck the north of Japan. In the wake of one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in the history of Japan, a state of nuclear emergency was declared, forcing the evacuation of thousands more.

We wanted to help. Just giving money didn’t seem like enough.

The idea for New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan was born.

What we need:
your stories, poems, and artwork (see our submission page)
your tweets and blogs and vlogs and facebooks (see our helping out page)
your eyeballs and discerning literary and artistic judgement (see our helping out page)

What we’re going to do with it:
Put together a beautiful collection of stories, poems, and art honoring and celebrating Japan.
And we’re going to give one hundred percent of the proceeds to a charity* currently working on the relief effort in Japan.

About submitting your work for this compilation :

New Sun Rising needs your stories, poems, and artwork celebrating Japan. They can be about Japanese people and culture, set in Japan, or executed in traditional Japanese forms. But those are just suggestions. Don’t feel limited—as long as the work is relevant to or evocative of Japan, that’s what we want.

Stories should be no longer than 5000 words, and please only send one, because we are going to have a lot of reading to do in a very short time.

Flash (under 1000 words) and micro-fiction are awesome. (I’d love to get a cell phone story. – Frankie) Please submit no more than 3 of these.

Poems should be no longer than 40 lines, and please no more than 3. (Unless it’s haiku. Then you can send us 5—and it’s still only 15 lines!)

We are also in need of some black and white artwork and photography. It should, again, be relevant to Japan. Please remember, we are putting together an ebook, so art submissions should be scalable to look good on all the devices people use for reading these days, plus print.

And we can’t have a book celebrating Japan without being open to manga, right? Please follow the submission guidelines for artwork, and no more than 5 pages.

This is a volunteer project for charity. We can’t afford to pay for your contributions; we’re asking for your work as a donation. There won’t be any royalties. All money from the book will go to a charity1 providing relief efforts in Japan. (Probably the Red Cross, but that’s not certain at this moment. The other options on the table are Doctors Without Borders or Save the Children.)

Click here for more details.