Caren Gussoff writer. geek. bon vivant. dot com

Of all the states I have ever lived in, Washington may be the most kind-hearted—and the most misguided.
One of the first bills to hit the docket in the 2010 state’s legislature was a proposal by the honorable Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin of Tacoma to change the language the state uses when referring to at-risk youth…to “at hope” youth.
Seriously. Read about it here:
“Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin, South Tacoma, says negative labels are hurting kids’ chances for success and she’s not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like “at risk” and “disadvantaged” are used.”
OK, fine. We play nice. We change the wording in 54 places throughout state documents to the tune of $3500.
$3500.
This made me rant and rave and scream for a bit. Then my palms started sweating. In my mind, this nice, kind-hearted lady wants, truly, to help these kids. I know that her intentions are kind. But in my mind, rather than waste legislature time (which costs money) and waste $3500 on changing wording in documents no one ever reads—take that 3500, purchase 10 rebuilt computers from rePC or another local reseller, and start up a computer program at a community center, teaching kids the computer skills they would need to go to college or become more competitive in the workplace. 10 rebuilt computers in a community center open for 4 hours after school 5 days a week could serve ~10 – 30 students per session, up to 150 students per week.
I dare someone to tell me that this would not do more for assisting at risk, disadvantaged youth more than talking about them in sweet innuendos.
Help people by HELPING people. Get the resources into the community, not the dusty documents that refer to the community—which will do nothing other that maybe earn this nice, kindly older lady another term representing Tacoma.
I was at risk, disadvantaged. I didn’t care what you called me, what the state called me. If I was even AWARE of what they called me, that is—which I pretty am well sure I had no clue. I cared what my mentors called me and I cared when my parents were involved and encouraging. I cared when someone took the time to help me build my skills and my self esteem. That’s what got me through high school, to college, then even into graduate school. Then, ultimately, into a life where this seems SO OBVIOUS.

Muchly for my own ref, but maybe you like to geek out about speculative numbers, too:

“How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?“

Come join me at this show.  It’ll be good stuff, pinky swear.

Blackbird Orchestra, your next new favorite band, will be performing with Portland’s own  The Red King. Also on hand will be Nathaniel Johnstone (of Abney Park), Finn Von Claret, and other local Seattle artists.

Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Columbia City Theater
Seattle, WA
Doors: 6:30PM
Music: 7:00PM
$10 via Brown Paper Tickets or $15 at the door the day of the show. Please 21+ with ID.

Wow, the weekend’s over already.
I’ve mostly avoided the internet. Barely checked email, did not twitter (twat?), no Facebook.  I did almost no writing, either.
Instead, I celebrated Frank’s birthday, ate salted caramel ice cream, hung out with Jamie, watched movies, hung out with my husnamd, read, ate pizza, hung out with my dad, knitted, read, walked around, started a volunteer job with the Puget Sound Blood Bank, and did some vital and painful deep cleaning.
By upbringing, I’m a bargain shopper and a hoarder. By nature, I am a purger. This causes an interesting internal, semi-annual struggle.
I am very talented at shopping. It is something I am very, very, very good at.
But for a long time, I’ve dreamt a pretty simple dream: only own things I like, use, and that fit me.
I mean, I’m not an ascetic. I so want to own more than a sarong and a rice bowl.
It should be pretty simple, right? Don’t buy or accumulate anything that I don’t like, will use, or that doesn’t fit.
But, this is not how my life has worked at all.
I buy or accumulate things I am unsure of, think I might need, or for some mysterious reason, find too great a deal to walk away from. Then these things never get used, and twice a year, those same things get bagged, tagged, and sent back out into the world. It’s stupid and wasteful. It stresses me right the fuck out.
But I did a mini search and destroy in the bedroom and chest of drawers. So far, I’ve tossed out/placed into thrift store pile/recycled:
• a makeup bag full of makeup, some dating back to when I retired from burlesque dancing…in 2004. Ugh
• a lawn sized garbage bag full of stretched out/faded/worn through/incorrect size, shape, color clothing, beyond even being downgraded to pajama status
• a drawer full of expired medicine–an entire drawer. Seriously
• a stack of books I will never read again (I buy a lot of used books and take out from the library. My home bookshelves are really misleadingly empty. I try and only keep books I love, refer to, are signed, special to me, or know I will read again)
• 3 good sized trash cans of paper–drafts, junk mail, who knows
• and at least 2 candles made more of dust and cat hair than paraffin. I think they were candles. Maybe they were soap. Ick

Now, I also indulged in today’s thrift store 50% off madness, but I did only buy a few things I actually needed: jeans, a tee shirt, a pair of very sensible ballet flats, some books…except for a very strange, very heavy, 70s copper pendant that has a creepy mermaid on one side and a creepier Viking ship on the other. But it’s really small. I swear.

*sigh*

And here comes Tuesday.

So, happy Fibromyalgia Awareness Day.

Fibromyalgia is a disease that particularly sucks, although not nearly as much as other diseases that shorten life spans, degenerate, or paralyze their afflicted. Instead, it just makes you hurt a lot in unexplainable and frustrating ways, makes your brain foggy and unable to hold a single thought for too long, your digestive system wonky, enhances migraines, and screws royally with your sleep, among other things. It affects an estimated 2% of the general population, who often have to go to absurd lengths in order to get diagnosed and treated. Then, because it is an invisible illness, also often have to continually explain that they really are ill to friends and family who, rightfully so, say, “You look fine.”

Hug your local, fine-looking 2% today, gently.

Thank you for all the good wishes and love today. I also want to give a shout out to my birthday twin, the genius journalist/wit Geoff Carter, of The Spellout Seattle.

Here’s what I wish, should you become drunk with a goodwill that loosens your pursestrings–don’t get me a gift. If you are tempted, I’d love for you to kick money to Clarion West, my new magazine Brain Harvest: an Almanac of Bad-Ass Speculative Fiction (you even get a hand-made mustache for your donation), or to your local humane society. Just sayin’.

So, I noticed that I have a Wikipedia entry, which is cool (although weirdly incomplete in places, but still–wow*) and that something that is really highlighted in the entry is my Romany heritage.  After reading a dear-hearted internet acquaintance’s (who is also an amazing SF writer) blog post about a recent horror, I realize that it’s probably time for my quarter-annual post about being Romany**.

Hi. I’m half Romany (Kalderasha, to be specific) and half German Jew.

The Romany consider me to be a Gadjo–an unclean outsider–at worst, and at best, a tolerable Didikai half breed. I don’t speak Romanes, I don’t hold to standards of cleanliness (like, I love a good bath and own two cats whom I adore, both of which are quite marime, or dirtyfilthyuncleanforbidden), I’m married to a Gadjo unapologetically (who is also a gentile, if you are keeping score for the Hebraic side).

That being said, I embrace my heritage–both sides. I’m extremely vocal about my Romany side, more than my German Jewish side, mostly because it is abundantly clear to me that the Rom are not only wickedly underrepresented in culture, but are also, right this freaking minute, under direct attack, suffering horrific neglect and poverty, and living under atrocities that most of us, thankfully, could never imagine. A simple Google news search for “Romany” or “Romani” will bring up some of the more recent icky stuff, centered currently in Italy and the Czech Republic.

What is interesting to me is how contrary public opinion is over the Romany. On one hand, there’s the perceived romance of it and the adoption of “gypsy” to signify a free-spirited lifestyle (which is particularly weird to many Rom, since there are a lot of strict cultural mores within), simultaneously existing with racial profiling, restricted access to education, forced sterilization, and ghettoization—all aimed at the same peoples.

I don’t write about being Romany in my fiction, or rather, I haven’t yet. I know I will because I suspect I must, sometime. And not only is it, uh, close to my heart, it fits in well with some SFF issues I tend to obsess about: what will happen to the cultures and individuals that cannot or will not adopt forward technology.
But anyway. That’s my speech. Hope you enjoyed it. You’ll see a variation next quarter***.

*and a big thank you to whomever decided I was interesting enough to even write the thing, BTW.
**Usual posts occur around Halloween, one of my favorite holidays, but one in which the proliferation of “Gypsy costumes” makes me want to crawl under a table and hide. The second usually occurs in Renaissance Faire season, in which it’s quite popular for some lasses to tighten up their corset and shake their tambourines. The third floats, and is usually tied to someone saying “gyp” within a twenty yard radius of me or some media depiction or high fantasy novel where the Rom are portrayed as rogue heroes, magical adepts, fortune telling  belly dancers, or baby munching demons.
***Wink. You’ve been warned.

—-

And just so this post isn’t just about ME, I wanted to point out a site which is probably old news for 90% of you reading this, but of which I am now a believer: Duotrope.com. AWEsome. I’ve been using them for awhile to find info on markets, but only recently started using their online submission tracker (I’d been using Sonar2, which is also rilly rilly good, but limited to the one box you install her on). The sub tracker at Duotrope is all web-based, so you can check your subs/stats/etc on the fly…and I am getting more and more on the fly these days.

Right now, it’s free (!), but they are soliciting donations to keep it so. I’m totally broke, but even I threw them a few bucks to keep this service running and available to all. If you use the sub tracker there, remember to toss them a few bucks now and then, will you? And if you’ve been looking for a solution for keeping track of your subs, I recommend them ever so highly.

I’ve been lax in writing but with good reason, fair reader. Life has me, pretty much, locked in a tower and is feeding me thrice-daily kicks in the groin. Then there was, you know, that holiday on Thursday, which me and mine ignored this year as best as we could (although I did make a kick-ass baked ziti in lieu of a turkey, and my husband made some double peanut butter cup cookies that managed to eat through the very last of the enamel on one of my molars).

In-between my groin kicks and ziti-gluttony, I have been catching up on lots of movies I never managed to see the first time around—some bad horror flicks (like Candyman. Seriously? I remember when that came out being told it was scary-as-shit. Maybe I am just jadedly un-scareable these days?) and some embarrassingly bad new stuff like Hellboy 2: The Golden Army—which leads me to the point of this entry: Things I Wish Were Real and I Could Have from SFF Movies I Have Seen.

Nothing in Hellboy 2 fits this description, but many of the character designs (sorry, del Toro) reminded me of Mirrormask, which, while also problematic in several fundamental ways, yielded the Number One Thing I Wish Were Real and I Could Have From SFF Movies I have Seen–the wee little circus band that lives in a handy, pocket-sized cube that unfolds into a tiny stage for them.

Wee band!

Seriously. How freaking twee are they?
Beyond life-saving nano-technology, beyond time travel, all that stuff…I want a band of tiny creatures wearing horned helmets I can carry around in my purse.

I know you have something equally as ridiculous on your list. Don’t you?

Happy birthday to a new friend, Cat Rambo!

And, the Army finally gets its first female four star general.

Voting
I voted. I’m a good citizen. My ballot is stamped and ready to go. Now I’ll just be edgy and crabby until the results.

Titles
I started working on a story that is cutting really fast and close to a bunch of personal stuff going on with me. The interesting part, though, is not the subject matter (well, it is) but what I want to discuss here is that I just started the draft and I came up with a really good title.
This does not always happen. In fact, I feel like I used to be better at titling my stories, then somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to consistently come up with good titles. This frustrates me, because I see what a lost opportunity a mediocre title is. A less-than-spectacular title makes me feel like I am ending my story out into the world, half-dressed. Or worse, wearing flip flops with an evening gown.
Once in a great while, a fantastic title occurs to me as I am drafting a piece, falling fully formed from my head like warrior Athena from Zeus. Like today. But most of the time, I struggle with the title long after I’ve called truce on editing.
The last draft I finished, in fact, is sitting, waiting for revision—which I can consciously avoiding because I can’t come up with a halfway decent title for it…and it’s driving me bananas.
I really don’t know how to trap the elusive title if it doesn’t happen naturally during drafting. I’ve tried various approaches: combing through the piece and circling phrases that seem to stand alone or suggest things; brainstorming words that were synonymous with the theme I hoped to underscore; letting it percolate quietly a while and hoping the universe will align and reveal a title to me; forcing a title by retrofitting something into the story post-draft; and having a couple dozen drinks and re-reading the draft. These have all worked to some degree—usually a lesser one.
Some days, I envy the visual artists who can just call something “Untitled #75” or some such and let the work stand, as it is.
Endings I think I have nailed. Beginnings I can fake in draft #2. But titles? Shit. Titles are hard.

Meme!
And now…a meme. Some intrepid readers have told me that I am “mysterious” and “vague” about personal stuff. So, here you go. I’m throwing anyone curious a bone.

Ten things you probably didn’t know about me. All totally true.

1.     I am slightly nyctophilic, and not in a goth-chic way. I really do not care for bright sunlight very much. I never have.
2.     I savagely bite my cuticles when I am stressed out. Like, until they bleed.
3.     I really like to knit, but only hats. Nothing else.
4.     I consider myself a Unitarian Universalist.
5.     I’m obsessed with purses, bags, and containers.
6.     Writing with a pencil sets my teeth on edge. I am picky about pens, but I’ll take the worst pen choice over a pencil. Pencils make me really uncomfortable.
7.     I had scarlet fever when I was seven. No one knows where I caught it. It is the cause of several chronic medical conditions.
8.     I can’t walk in heels of any height for more than ten minutes. Even kitten heels.
9.     I do not like the color yellow. At all. Any shade.
10.   I wince when I eat crunchy foods. I don’t know why. It’s like I am preparing to have my teeth crack.