Category: Happiness

  • Happy Things

    1. One of the things I love lately is that when you do a search on “Christopher Barzak” at Amazon.com, the number two listing is Rufus Wainwright’s new album “Release the Stars”.  This makes me ridiculously happy for some reason that, as Amazon says, customers who have pre-ordered my novel have gone on to buy…

  • Surprise

    I had the most awesome birthday evening yesterday. I spent most of the day on my own, just bumbling along from one thing to another. Then in the evening, went to the Stage, where I met my parents in the parking lot outside with my friends and took the elevator up to the third floor…

  • Birthday

    It’s that time of year again.  Today:  lounging around doing nothing but whatever I want, mostly reading and eating chocolate brownies and then later, going to The Stage, where I’ll give a reading from One for Sorrow, then a martini or two at Imbibe, then dancing!  It’s nice outside.  I may go outside to read…

  • Summer Festival of the Arts

    This weekend was Youngstown’s Summer Festival of the Arts. (Pictures in my flickr, just click on the sidebar pics to see them all). It was held on YSU’s campus. I hadn’t been to the festival in years. Last year I’d been at Readercon in Boston when it was held, and missed it. I was glad…

  • I want my 21st Century Gothic. Do you?

    I recently read a review of the latest Realms of Fantasy at Tangent, and this was the review for my story: “Little Miss Apocalypse” by Christopher Barzak is a bit of a downer, but I can’t say the author didn’t warn us. It’s about enduring love, but a rather sick form of it, in my…

  • Light

    For the past week I’ve been doing a revision to a story I recently wrote, which I’ve spent hours each day working on, so I’ve not been spending much time blogging, and it feels odd actually.  In the fall, winter and spring I was always blogging and had some thought I wanted to put into…

  • Back again

    I’m back from the Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop, held in the mountains of North Carolina, where I was with eleven really awesome writers critiquing each others stories for the past week.  There was much fun:  dancing, singing, playing a silly game of Dungeons and Dragons, talking about writing and publishing, doing yoga, hiking, giving a…

  • Cafes of Youngstown (Updated)

    During winter I don’t like to leave my apartment unless I have to–I was born a summer child, so although I enjoy the Christmastime mood of the beginning of winter, I prefer warmth and light. So for those winter months, I write at home a lot. In Spring, Summer and Fall, though, I like to…

  • Scaping the Street in Downtown Youngstown

    This Saturday was Streetscape in Youngstown’s downtown. A couple of hundred volunteers from the community came out to plant flowers and to landscape the downtown together. It was a really awesome thing to be a part of, working side by side sometimes with people from your city that you know, and with people from your…

  • Wiscon Redux

    Ok, so I am settled into a cafe here in Youngstown with wifi access that you *don’t* have to pay for, which seems to be the problem with a lot of cafes I stop in at. So many are those T-mobile spots like at airports where you have to buy access, which I think is…