New book "The Way"

A bit of surrealism. A bit of mysticism. A richness of imagery. And a lot of reflection: on beauty, on fear, and death. And also a multitude of questions: addressed to the Universe and addressed to my readers.

That's what my new book called "The Way" will be. A book in which I have collected my writings over a considerable period of time. More than ten years, that's for sure. In fact, "The Way" is two books. And they will be published simultaneously. In one I've compiled my poems. In the other, short and sketch stories.

This post is about these books being finalised and put together, about finally finding the title (literally a week ago). This is an announcement that, here, the books are in, the books are to be. What's not there yet is an exact publication date. So I suggest keeping an eye on the news. At the moment I am busy correcting the text in Russian and preparing it for publication. Most likely, the Russian version will be published on Ridero and Amazon in late summer or early autumn. After that, I will work on the English version. There is more work there - I expect publication during the autumn of this year.

If you visit the pages of the books, you can see they look like this:

This is a preliminary version of the cover. But it roughly conveys the atmosphere that will be on the final version as well.

The book "The Way. Short Stories" will include stories from my "Year of Stories" series, among others. You can read some of them here: https://www.petergoncar.com/blog/categories/short-stories

And in an upcoming post, I'll also share a couple of the latest poems that will be included in the book "The Way. Poetry".

October news

October (especially its second half) happened to be saturated with various literary events.

22 October there was a regular meeting of the "Krakow Writers' Group", being a part of which is a great joy and source of inspiration for me. The whole evening of that day contributed to getting inspiration: the streets of Krakow, breathing with magic, the evening after rain... And the meeting of fellow writers, reading works, reflecting upon them.

While on the 28th of October, I was lucky enough to participate in the Conrad Festival, the major literary festival of Krakow. It was nice to listen to the authors reading out their works in their native languages (there were authors from Portugal, Netherlands, Czechia). That is a great idea of the European project CELA - let the original languages of the works sound. Still, the evening was not limited to the original languages - there were also works presented in English. So, as part of the evening, I read the English version of my story "The Day of Scream".

A Year of Stories

A year of stories. And I’m not talking about 2020. I declare 2021 the year of stories. Though it’s bold of me to give the year its name, its destiny. But generally, what is the point?

I decided to take a "writing assignment". Over the next year, I will write stories that I will then publish on social networks and on my blog on the site. A new story for every new week. This makes 52 stories in total by the end of the year.

Honestly, I don't quite know yet what the stories will turn out to be, what will be plot and genres. It's always the same with me. I just lay myself out to the creative flow. I just write. And I invite you to watch the stories emerge and come to life.

The beginning of my whole venture and the publication of the first story is on December 21st. This is the winter solstice and it is on this date that days will start to gradually lengthen and the new year will begin.

Of course, the past year made it very clear to us once again that planning ahead can be completely useless... Well, then it will be even more interesting to see what will be the end of this literary marathon.

P.S. I remind you that English is not my first language. And I ask you not to faint at the sight of a mistake (but I will work as much as possible to avoid them). These will be stories without any kind of editing and corrections. This way you will be able to see how my books look before the editor polishes them.