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. 

Inspiration

The way we look at the world around us is, I think, what sets writers apart from non-writers - or, I should say, what sets creative people apart from non-creative people.

I'm a wildlife biologist, so I have to do a lot of wildlife biology things. This week, it's been dove banding - catching white-winged and mourning doves in wire traps and sticking unique metal bands around their legs, so that if they're hunted during dove season, we can (hopefully) retrieve those bands and learn more about where the doves go. 

paths of mourning doves
from banding to retrieval sites

I set my traps in a blasted, dusty parcel of land about ten miles outside of town. It's overrun with feral swine and invader brush species, and looks nothing like the rippling grassland of yore, the beautiful habitat West Texas used to have before naive ranchers showed up with their sheep and goats and ruined it. 

Every morning I drive to the sites, flip over the wire traps, bait them, and then sit around for 30-60 minutes waiting for the doves to get caught. Lately, I've been combining this waiting-around time with exercise time - I love to jog, and there's nowhere to jog in my town except a little park with a 1-mile loop that, frankly, gets boring very quickly.

So I put on my running shoes, sunscreen, and sunglasses, and take off down the dusty desert road. 

In the morning, before the blazing sun reaches its full potential, or when it gets lost in the banks of clouds that usually hover on the horizon, jogging in the desert is glorious. Even in such an "ugly" habitat. Giant tarantulas bask in the middle of the road, roadrunners and jackrabbits dart across my path, and dung beetles roll their putrid prizes through the ruts, cleaning up after the Mexican fighting cattle that I hope not to run into. 

And as I jog past, appreciating them, my mind starts to swirl with language so I can get home and write it all down. 

I wonder if I would feel this level of appreciation if I weren't a writer.

And if I would feel the same sense of futility about expressing how I feel about what I see - like seeing a beautiful sunset and trying to paint it, knowing the painting will never be able to communicate what I want it to. 

I've had a long-standing theory that this is the reason musicians, writers, and actors have a tendency to descend into drug and alcohol problems. There's a certain amount of "mental risk" that's part of being a creative person. Creative people think differently - they allow themselves to wonder "what if", allow themselves to sink into other worlds, and to feel things about their own world that non-creative people have no patience for. 

On the one hand, that kind of sensual experience is bound to screw with our brains; spending so much time in a wonderful, exciting, adventure-filled world of our creation, and then having to go back to reality, can eat a person alive. Falling so deep into imagination can affect our real relationships and instill a sense of dissatisfaction that infiltrates every aspect of daily life. And like the artist trying to paint that beautiful sunset, we face the judgment, the uncertainty, the terror, that we'll fail in our task of communicating what we think is of the utmost importance.

But on the other hand, the joy and satisfaction we feel when we're painting, or writing, or whaling on that guitar - entrenched in those worlds, in our imaginations - can be well worth it.

Take music, for example. I love being able to hear a song and let it just fill me with something indescribable, even if it leaves me, on the other side, emotionally wrecked. Why did it leave me emotionally wrecked? I don't know...that violin part at the end, or the crescendo guitar riff in the instrumental break or the...melody thing at 3:27. 

But talk about going from sky-high to rock-bottom in the space of a single song. It's a dangerous line to toe.

Yet I think I am extremely fortunate to be able to experience that kind of emotional depth. I always feel sorry for people who don't "get" music; they're probably happier but damn, at what a cost! It's the same feeling I get when I read certain books or watch certain movies. I'm never able to pinpoint exactly what part messed me up so much. I like to think it's because that's what art is supposed to do - communicate something of the world, or of the artist, in a deeper way than language ever can. Expose a piece of a human being's soul that you can't see in any other way, a piece they're desperate to show you.

I want to be able to communicate my awe when I jog in the desert. In my short story Ten Toes (which I'm currently trying to publish), I want to communicate the destructive effects of violence in a way that sticks with you. In The Great Divide, I want you to see my love for the wilderness and understand the fear that keeps me up at night that it's going to disappear. I want to show you. I need to. 

Creating art leaves bits of the soul behind, sure. And all that soul-leaving can't be good for a person. But thank God creative people risk their sanities to do these things.

So, it's been a while...

I'm currently re-vamping this as my author blog.

When I first started it, I was working as a genetics tech in Missouri and thought it would be fun to write little blurbs about Life when it intrigued me - like the big ol' dog who lived next door.

But it turned out that place I lived was WEIRD and my landlord was NUTSO and I'm not too fond of remembering it. Then the funding dried up for that job and I ended up going to Honduras and Mexico and getting pneumonia and living in a jungle (not necessarily in that order) and I sort of forgot about this blog.

Anyway, I'll try to update this thing more as writer-y things happen or I have writer-y thoughts and whatnot.

I love the word whatnot.

In the meantime, check out my new "Stories" and "About Me" pages. And have a pretty picture of a pronghorn I saw on the job last year.

Did you know pronghorn are not actually antelope, are the only member of the taxonomic family Antilocapridae (which sounds infuriatingly like "antelope" - damn you, taxonomists), and are endemic to North America? That means they live here and nowhere else!

The dog next door

At the moment, I reside in a tiny little addition to a small house in Columbia, Missouri. I have my own bathroom and bedroom attached by a small hallway to the homeowner's garage and "dog room" (probably intended as a living room, but occupied currently by two large dogs and their accessories).

The next-door neighbors have a huge old black lab. He is huge, and he is old. He walks with stiff legs, head hung low and swinging from side to side. He spends most of his time wandering around aimlessly between his backyard and my landlord's, and his favorite spot to lie down seems to be in the no-dog's-land between them. From here he barks at me, my landlord, and whoever happens to be walking down the street. He barks long after the offending trespasser is out of view, and I think I can see by the look in his eyes that after a while he no longer knows exactly what he was barking at, but barks for the sheer joy of barking, with a contented glazed look on his face. His name is Hank.

One of the first days I lived here, I saw him lying in my landlord's backyard and went over to meet him, not knowing where he lived. He wagged his tail and let me pet him. I'm pretty sure he doesn't remember me, since he still always barks at me. My landlord's dogs bark at him from inside; they like to sit in front of the big, curtain-less sliding glass door (located right next to my room) and bark at all moving things any time, day or night, much to my chagrin. But when the door opens and they bound outside, they take no notice of him. He doesn't bark at them. He just lies there while they frolic and pee in the grass and careen through the tree-fence separating my landlord's and neighbors' houses from the ones behind. He watches them.

I don't really think he wants to join them, and I don't think he's jealous of them.

Tonight as I was trying to enjoy a cool early autumn Missouri evening, watching a prime time sitcom peripherally while doing some Googling, I heard a very strange noise. It was certainly a dog, but it sounded like some kind of demented poodle being strangled. It went on for quite a while. It was distracting me from my very important tasks of Googling and half-listening to my sitcom. I peeked through the blinds on my window. It was dark, and I didn't expect to see anything; but the very next time the dog barked, I was able to locate the source of the sound.

There on the neighbor's back porch was Hank, crying to be let inside. I couldn't see his head, but every time I heard him bark, I could see the shape of his huge belly heaving. I watched him for a few minutes. Periodically he turned around and walked a few steps toward my landlord's house, shifted his back legs like he wanted to lie down but couldn't quite get his arthritic hips to cooperate, then turned back and continued his high-pitched pleading at the back door. This was nothing like his normal, deep boom of a bark, but a cry that seemed almost despondent.

The neighbors clearly weren't home. I finally pulled on my bathrobe (which has a dog embroidered on the front pocket), exited my room, took two steps to the sliding glass door, and walked outside. I clapped my hands once and Hank turned his huge head toward me, staring at me but making no move. Suddenly I heard the sliding door open again as my landlord let her dogs out, and they did their normal frolic and pee in the backyard, completely ignoring Hank. Hank walked to the end of the concrete patio and watched them with his head hung low, a lonely silhouette against the glow of the porch light behind him.

My landlord's dogs, used to the evening routine, quickly returned, and I let the younger, more hyper one inside while I spent a few extra minutes giving the older one a good ear scratch. I kept my eye on Hank.

He watched us for just a moment longer, then finally turned away, slowly laid down on his belly, and rested his head on his paws. He was faced away from us.

As I opened the door and let myself and my landlord's dog back inside, I thought about Hank. He didn't need or want to be scratched behind the ears, he didn't need any attention from me or the other dogs - I think he just needed a reminder that he wasn't alone.

I think that's why he watches them, and why I feel like he's not jealous.

For some people, secluded places or grand vistas overlooking natural, human-less landcapes offer the best places for reflection; but I find that I always seek humanity-filled places to do it. I've spent much of my adult life hiking in national parks and forests, found myself atop high mountains, breathing in crisp, pure air, and while I will always love doing these things, I never find peace for my soul in these places. I never find inspiration or revelation. Give me a busy street, a stadium filled with passionate sports fans, a concert hall or movie theater or church (especially just before the action happens), and I am inspired.

Humans - and dogs - were not meant to be alone, and sometimes all it takes is a reminder that we're not. Life goes on aside from our little problems, our arthritic hips, our insecure futures, and sometimes watching someone else's joy is enough to make us remember what joy feels like.