A handful of news: March 2019

Seven months have flown by in no time, so I'm back with another irregular update. My life has been busy and interesting lately. Right now I'm focusing on writing in Polish, while the plans to branch out into English have temporarily taken a back seat since so much is happening on the home front.

1. After five months of hard work, and many struggles with paralyzing self-doubt and writer's block, a month and a half ago I managed to complete book 4 of the Teatr węży [Darkgleam] series, entitled Śpiew potępionych [The Song of the Damned]. I'm insanely relieved that it's finally written! The book is now undergoing the final round of editing (I'm making the last small tweaks and corrections) and will appear in print in 2019, perhaps as early as June.

Take a look at the edited manuscript with the line editor's comments: 

2. Two years ago, I became one of the founding members of an all-female group of Polish speculative fiction authors known as Harda Horda or in English as Fantastic Women Writers of Poland. Briefly, we're a group of professional and semi-professional writers who banded together in order to be more visible on the Polish book market, and to challenge some of the stereotypes about female fiction. Most of us write sf/f/h, but some have successfully branched out into unrelated genres such as crime fiction, or even moved out of genre fiction into mainstream fiction. As a part of our promotional efforts, last year we penned an anthology of 12 stories (one by each member), and this anthology has recently been published by Wydawnictwo SQN, a Polish publisher based in Cracow. The book is a deluxe, hardcover, illustrated edition, it looks wonderful and is attracting lots of positive attention. We're very happy and proud!

And the lovely illustration to my story looks like this:

3. A different, but also all-female team has put together a more low-profile, but equally high-quality project: Fenixa, a special issue of the Fenix: Antologia zine. All the featured stories and all but one of the articles were written by women, and the cover artwork was also done by a female artist (you may be interested to know that the cover artwork and illustrations for the Harda Horda anthology are the work of female artists as well). Notably, Fenixa features two foreign novelettes, and one of them is Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man by Megan Lindholm, translated by yours truly. I wanted to translate this story into Polish ever since I first read it in the late '90s!

4. I've recently had the pleasure of translating two other beautiful stories into Polish: The Dala Horse by Michael Swanwick and The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata. Both are awaiting publication in the Nowa Fantastyka magazine.

This year, I ended up missing the London Book Fair once again for various reasons, but I'll probably spend a significant amount of time at Polish book fairs in the second half of the year. I also have all sorts of plans for the future that need more thought and more work. I will return here from time to time (I update my Polish blog much more often).