West Texas Vocab

As someone who's moved from place to place almost more times than I can count, I'm always on the lookout for regional slang/dialect. I thought I'd share some of the new vocabulary words I've learned now that I've been in West Texas for a year.

Ditch chicken. This one made me laugh uncontrollably. Picture below. You might know it as a ring-necked pheasant in more normal parts of the country.

Speedgoat. Pronghorn. It's not a goat (or an antelope) but it's pretty dang fast - the fastest land mammal in North America, able to reach speeds of up to 55 mph.

Three pronghorn does. Photo taken from a plane during 2014 pronghorn surveys

Norther. Cold front. They always come from the north.

Bull bat. Common nighthawk, a bird in the order Caprimulgiformes that comes out in the evenings, has weird gangly wings that make a funny sound when the bird dive-bombs bugs, and is nearly impossible not to hit when driving down the highway at night.

Turdfloater. Heavy rain, heavy enough to pool in the roads and pastures and, well, move the cow turds around.

Vinegaroon. This horrifying creature:

not my photo, not my man-hands

...which is apparently some kind of arachnid related to scorpions. Also known as whipscorpions, vinegaroons are not venomous, fortunately (though they're still horrifying and I hope I never actually see one).

Summer. March - November.

Breeze. Any wind speed less than 30 mph.

Hurricane. Glorious, wonderful source of rain. Wait, they're bad for some people?

That's it for now. Pop quiz tomorrow.

Rejection - Your Most Dangerous Villain

It's been a rough couple of days. Not only did I find out I wasn't selected for an interview for a dream wildlife biology job in Washington...

wrong Washington, though the pic seemed appropriate

...but I also received two rejections from agents I queried.

I still can't figure out why Washington doesn't want me, since I feel like I'm a pretty objectively good wildlife biologist. As for the agent thing, though, anyone will tell you that getting lots of rejection is pretty standard.

But it's still hard.

And the worst part is it makes me not excited about writing anymore. Every time.

I've had quite a few sleepless nights thinking about those writers who struck it big with best-selling debut titles and movie deals and all that jazz. I think that, to date, these moments have been my biggest battles with Envy - especially when the authors were young, just plain lucky, and/or wrote books that I didn't find particularly good. Dammit, my book is good. Why doesn't anyone want it?

At the moment, I don't feel much like writing. My characters are beckoning, my unfinished scenes are playing out in a neverending filmstrip in my mind with all the possible permutations and twists and turns and dialogue, and will continue to do so until I write them down.

But I don't feel like it.

The problem with this is the logic. I started writing not because I wanted to sell a book. I started writing because I loved it.

I've been doing it since I was 5, took a break in high school, and finally returned to it at age 28. I've sat for hours with my eyes glued to the computer screen, goosebumps on my arms, because I love where my story is going or just finished writing a particularly exciting/moving/compelling scene. (This is a big thing for me - I have a hard time sitting still for any extended period of time. For any other reason.) I've experienced the joy of feeling like the book is writing itself, like when I come across a potential plot hole, and realize I unwittingly solved it months ago with a scene to which, at the time, I didn't give much thought. I treasure the hours and hours of driving I have to do for my job, because I get to get paid for sitting and thinking about my novel. I thought up some of my best stuff on these drives.

And I'm so glad the timing has worked out the way it has. If I didn't have writing, I'm convinced I'd go insane in this tiny town where the only things to do are meth and bowling.

Anyway, the point of this post is that, sometimes, I have to remind myself of this. It's easy to get discouraged when all you're getting are rejections (or even if you do get the occasional request for the full MS). It's easy to forget why I started doing this in the first place.

Sometimes, you just need to back away for a while. Publishing is not the means to an end. It's an end, and should be the least enjoyable part of the process - a process that we voluntarily began, because we love it. We must not forget that.

We're writers. Writers write. We write because we can't not.

Everything Here Wants To Kill Me

Welcome to the desert.

I live in West Texas, in a town I like to call the Worst Place in America. I won't name names. Really, though, there aren't a whole lot of towns out here, so you can probably guess.

It was hard to move here, I'll admit. I lived in a crappy hotel for a week before I found my apartment, a place where dead cockroaches and the stale scent of old carpet greeted me when I walked in, and the door doesn't fit on the hinge properly and lets all manner of creepy-crawlies invade. But there was nowhere else to go. The booming oil and gas industry claimed all the housing (and then made it so I pay twice what I should in rent).

Plastic bags and other trash clings to everything and flutters when the wind blows (which is all the time). The number of gas stations per capita is absurdly high because my town is the only thing on the Interstate for miles and miles in either direction. The sound of the tractor-trailers roars all day long. As for a social scene for 20-somethings, or the prospect of meeting the Man of My Dreams, well, neither of those things exist.

As they like to say of Alaska, the odds are good but the goods are odd. 

Why didn't I just hop back into my moving van and drive straight back to Austin, you ask? Well, because all that was waiting for me there was my old job as a barista at Starbucks, making minimum wage (with a Master's degree under my belt, I might add).

I came here for my career. I promised myself I'd stay a year.

And now I have. (Which, incidentally, makes it the longest I've stayed at the same job if you don't count graduate school, which took 23 months.)

I made sacrifices, sure. I got used to things I thought I'd never get used to.

Big Bend National Park

  I used to think I had to live near water; now I no longer shake my fist in anger when the storm that's been building on the horizon all day, growing ever closer hour by hour and wafting the scent of rain and the sound of thunder into town, magically disappears on the edge as if repelled by the Worst Place in the World-ness of this city. Even God doesn't want to touch this place, I always think, with bitterness. But I've gotten used to it.

I got used to the cockroaches. I cut a water bottle in half and keep it on the table to scoop up the dead ones in the summer. I plug the sinks at night. I can't stand the crunch when I squish the live ones, so I've perfected my aim for throwing heavy things at them.

I got used to the spider living under my pantry. He might be highly venomous; I have no idea. He eats flies and mosquitoes and for that I'm grateful. I even wrote a story about him (or her).

I got used to the way everything out here wants to kill me. To pulling mesquite and goatshead thorns out of my foam sandals every thirty seconds. To watching the ground before my feet when I jog so I don't step on a rattlesnake. To becoming crepuscular in my outdoor habits so the summer heat doesn't scald me. And for watching my back when I'm near the border.

I even got used to the seclusion. I got used to spending all my free time watching Netflix, writing, and playing my guitar. I got in touch with my inner introvert, channeling all the bitterness and self-loathing I fear from loneliness into my fingers, and purging all of it in my rare moments of socialization with coworkers, so that they never even suspect it.

I got used to the desert.

Funny thing is, I grew up in it: Mesa, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert with its endemic saguaro cacti. I never remembered hating it. Why would I? I had nothing to compare it to. It was only when I went off to college in the Northwest, and worked jobs in Colorado and Yellowstone and later the Ozark hills of Missouri, that I realized what I was missing.

Rain. Snow. Creeks. Trees. Shade.

I vowed I could never again live without them. Like Tolkien's lost Elves who have never seen the sea, but feel it in their blood, the forest was in mine. It always had been. And once I saw it, I knew I could never go back. It was a cruel fate that found me hopping from job to job for the next twelve years, only to land right back in the ecosystem I had vowed never to return to, with its heat and thorns and fangs and venom.

And the funny thing is, I kind of like it. Took me a year to realize it.

I may have traded Sonora for Chihuahua, saguaro for lechugilla, but it's much the same. There's something magical about a place that's so hostile that everything in it will kill to protect its niche, the niche it worked so hard to find. There's something magical about the way the red rocks glow after the sun sets, and every living creature awakens and moves where before you would swear there was nothing. There's magic in the smell of the rain because it is so scarce, magic that no one who has not suffered through drought could ever appreciate.

All the pictures on this blog post were taken by me, on and off the job right here in the Trans-Pecos. Once you get past the dryness, the heat, and the cockroaches, it's a pretty amazing place.

Maybe the desert is in my blood, too.