August | 2010 | Christopher Barzak

I’ve been sort of running around like crazy today, as my friend and former editor, Juliet Ulman, sent me a photograph she took of her copy of Elle magazine’s September issue. It’s a photograph of the contributor’s page, where the photographer and film director Carter Smith is asked what he anticipates doing this fall, and he states that he hopes he’ll be directing the film adaptation of “Christopher Barzak’s book One for Sorrow“.

I about fell out of my chair. Mr. Smith indeed purchased an option to make my novel into a film last year, but you know, these sorts of things sometimes happen and most of the time they don’t. It still may not happen, but if he’s finished the screen adaptation of the novel, it probably means he’s still planning on it. Here’s hoping that he can make it happen. I would love to see how he translates the story to the screen.

Here’s the photo Juliet sent me. I’m still always surprised by the interest people have taken in this book. It’s very gratifying. 🙂

My adopted Japanese mother recently complained that I no longer take pictures of things and post them online. She questioned whether this was because I needed a new camera. Maybe my old one no longer worked?

And so when my birthday came, a package from Japan arrived at my house. Inside the package was a new Canon digital camera. Now I am compelled to post photographs. Those Japanese ladies are sneaky!!

Here are the first ones I’ve taken. I do remember taking lots of photos while I lived in Japan, and posting them here for friends and family and interested parties to see what life was like where I was living. And I remember that it was fun to do this. In the past two years, though, life became very busy for me, teaching full time, taking classes toward an MFA degree that I’ve finished this summer, and trying amid all of this to continue writing. I had to stop doing lots of things I enjoyed doing, things that added to my happiness in life quotient, while managing these other pursuits. Writing a blog and taking photographs and posting those was one of those things that stopped, not completely, but to a trickle. I want to get back into the habit of it, though, because keeping a blog wasn’t only just fun, it satisfied my desire to have a space in which to meditate out loud, and to share things from my life with people I want to keep in touch with but live far from. Even though I’m back in the U.S., I have lots of friends who live far away, in other states. And also in other countries.

So here are a few photos I took recently. Home, garden, cats (Kokoro first, Yuki second), and an amazing Tom Kha soup that Tony made tonight.