The phrase “get back on the horse” usually refers to someone getting “thrown” from said horse. A tragedy occurs, a heart is broken, a house burns down or a car is totaled – it’s something that throws the individual in question completely out of whack. Equilibrium is shot. The status quo’s out the window. The only way to get back on track is to get back on the horse, even if it just threw you.

However, it’s not just the earth-shattering events that cause us to leave the back of our steeds. Sometimes, things just stop for a bit. The horse needs water or caught a rock in their hoof. We swing down from the saddle, tend to the horse, and take some time for ourselves as well, to grab a bite or take in the scenery. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, but the bottom line is we stop our progress in our journey.

One of my favorite Westerns of recent years is Hidalgo, and not just because Viggo Mortensen’s in it. Towards the end, Frank (Viggo’s character) goes through a somewhat trippy sequence. He and Hidalgo have fought tooth and nail to persevere in the punishing race across the desert, and the horse is so exhausted that Frank considers putting his companion down. However, he experiences admonitions from his Lakota ancestors to finish the journey and that he and his horse need each other. Emerging from the dream, Frank turns to see Hidalgo on his feet and waiting for the rather thick human to get back on so they can win the damn race. (If you haven’t seen this film, it’s a lot of fun and a classic adventure steeped in Western trappings, so check it out. Also, horses!)

Our desires and dreams are a bit like that horse. We might think that they’re daunting or even impossible to complete. We may exhaust ourselves trying to pursue them at the same time we struggle to make ends meet and address practical matters of living in the modern age. Bills need to be paid, clients need to be appeased, debts need to be settled and obligations need to be met. A lot of needs shove and yank us hither and yon, leaving little energy for ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to put that energy into something that seems like it’ll go nowhere, considering there are tons of others out there already doing what we wish we could. Better to bear those ills we have, etc.

Besides, a lot of creative people including myself are a bit like magpies. We may want to get from A to B but between those two points are shiny things. New movies, favorite games, comfortable stories and old favorites. We flit to and fro in our free time, especially if we’ve spent ourselves on a creative effort that is either seems too daunting or returns little gratification. The keyboard, the controller, the popcorn bucket, the remote for the TV – they’re security blankets, things to cling to when the phone calls from collectors begin and we want to just forget about deadlines for a while.

But we get a nudge. Like an impatient horse standing behind us whose gotten their water and taken some time to rest their hooves, our desires don’t leave us alone. We can’t stay in idyllic wilderness settings forever. We’re on a journey, here. And while the journey itself is often just as interesting as the destination, if not moreso, we won’t reach our goals if we stand in the middle of the field staring at them. We have to move there. We have to make the effort. We have to get back on the horse.

It could be argued that a lot of this “writer’s block” stuff comes from us blocking ourselves. It’s an excuse to stop expending effort, burn a little less lean tissue, invite less stress into our lives. I stopped work on Acradea to finish the Blizzard contest entry, and then… played more Warcraft. Got some fresh air. Saw Scott Pilgrim. Cheered for the Union. And it was fun, refreshing and relaxing.

But my manuscript’s still here. It’s waiting for me. If it were a horse, it’d be looking at me somewhat impatiently. It wants to move forward, continue the journey, get to a place where it can be hand-fed some damn oats by a pretty farmer’s daughter. It’s not going to get there while I stand around wool-gathering.

For my part, it’s past time to get back on the horse. Have you had moments like that? Has a project, a work in progress, given you a mental nudge to remind you it’s still there? Have you ever taken a break for longer than you expected, only to find you need to pull yourself back into working on it?

Dichotomies of personality are fascinating to me. Studying Jungian psychological theory and philosophy could eat up a great deal of my time and probably make my reviews of films like Dark City, Inception and even The Dark Knight more interesting. But I tend to be a lazy slacker, while wanting to do things that require intellectual effort. My own dichotomy is one I need to study and discern, because lately it’s kind of been pissing me off.

I’m a dreamer. I look up towards the stars, away from the mundanity and mediocrity of the world, and I see what could be. I envision things that haven’t been created yet. I feel urges within myself to create those things, to bring them to life. I’ve almost always got an idea on my mind, a snippet of fictional conversation or a scene of drama or flashes of action, even as I’m going about mundane tasks. I’d like to think that this little touch of insanity is what’s keeping me sane.

On the other hand, I’m a slacker. After expending energy in a day’s work, especially when it’s at a job I attend just to keep my bills paid, I want to relax, to enjoy not pushing myself, to treat or reward myself for surviving another day. I’ve already burned a lot of lean tissue over the course of the daylight hours, I tell myself. Stress just makes my already dwindling lifespan shorter, and spending more time making myself miserable is wasteful.

Nights like last night make me stop and correct myself, examine my thinking. Both writing and playing games became stressful. Granted, at one point I was trying to do both at the same time because a lot of time had already been lost in the afternoon and evening, which probably didn’t help matters. The point is this. The game ceased to be fun; it felt like a job. The writing was going nowhere; the blinking cursor of the document seemed to mock my creative impotence.

Every day is a series of choices. We choose to get up and go to work, or not. We choose to pursue what’s important to us, or put it off for another day. We choose to push ourselves to excel, or hold back for fear of the critics. We choose to reach for the stars, or just watch those who’ve already achieved orbit because our arms hurt.

I think lately I’ve been making the wrong ones, from how I spend my time to how I view my projects. Last night was bad. Today should be better, but only if I choose wisely.

It’s amazing how moving something small can make a huge difference.

We’ve been in the process of rearranging our apartment. The latest change saw a large stack of things by the lower corner of the bed, meaning I’d have to crawl out of it in a somewhat awkward manner. Over the weekend (Sunday night in fact) we moved things again, and I took it upon myself to shift that stack a bit, resulting in a much easier way for me to get up and about first thing in the morning.

I woke this morning with more energy and determination. All because I moved a couple boxes.

It’s hard to say how things will turn out when you start rearranging things, cleaning them up, putting them in a different order. The same thing could be said about writing, especially the revision process. Move a couple of words, put sentences in a different order, and hey presto, something that was just a brain-dump of information becomes taut and dramatic. Clean up a few things, and a mess becomes a masterpiece. It can even cure that thing we used to call ‘writer’s block’ before some sagely men in manly beards told us writer’s block is a crock.

Has this happened to you before? What are some good examples? Do you have particular days when you clean things up, be it around the house or in your writing?

This is Lazy Seal. My wife loves Lazy Seal. The entire time we were at Mystic Aquarium this past weekend, that seal didn’t move. It lay on that rock, sunning itself, near cool water if it wanted a swim. It knows a human will be coming around eventually to feed it fish. It doesn’t have to hunt or defend its territory. That seal’s got it made.

There are days when we, as humans, feel like Lazy Seal. The humidity goes into triple digits, the temperature skyrockets, oil falls from the sky to kill the wildlife and we question the relevance of our actions. We do this mostly by being unmotivated to do anything significant. We play games. We look for amusements on the Internet. We sit, we sweat, we suffer from lethargy.

Unfortunately, unlike Lazy Seal, we don’t have it made. (Not all of us do, anyway) We have to work. We have to do something to make money. Bill collectors, landlords and creditors are unsympathetic towards lethargy. So, we need to fight it. We need to get off the couch, peel ourselves away from the leather office chair that faces our monitors, and go out to do something.

This is something I could use help with, folks. I’ve been feeling rather lethargic lately. How do you fight it? What sort of diet keeps the lazy seal feeling at bay? Should I be working out more? Lay some knowledge on me.

Maybe it’s just me, as I amble towards the end of my current project, doing my utmost to follow my own tenth rule of writing fiction. There’s something that I’ve noticed over the past week. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting into ‘conference’ mode, or maybe this is a side effect of continuing to get everything squared away with the new flat.

The impression I get, however, is that the sooner we get to that finish line, the more things crop up to grab us by the ankles and trip us up before we cross it. Like hitting the wall only with the goal in site.

I mentioned this last week but I might have given the impression that I see a large portion of the entertainment industry through a somewhat cynical lens. I occasionally have to remind myself that the same industry that produces The Human Centipede or Jumper also produces Schindler’s List and District 9. For every Twilight, there’s A Song of Ice and Fire. You might hear a bit of Nickleback on the radio, but there’s bound to be a little Muse right around the corner. I guess what I’m driving at is that I don’t hate the industry, and it’s unfair of me to paint it with a broad brush.

But there is mediocrity out there. There’s the kind of thinking that would have you subscribe to the notion that it’s okay just to get by. That being amazing is just wrapping up another client’s project, and exemplary work is the kind that brings in more business that’ll help maintain the Audi’s suspension for another six months. That’s the kind of thing I want to get away from. And as I get a bit closer to finishing a manuscript that feels like it’s got something behind it other than my hot air and swollen ego, a bit of fiction with a brain in its head and some characters that actually have a touch of depth to them, I can almost feel that mediocrity creeping up on me, trying to smother my enthusiasm and remind me that my place is not to shine among the stars but to look up at them and dream as I remain mired in the mud down in the foundations of somebody else’s palace.

It’s like spraining a toe in the last 5 meters of a 100 meter dash. Taking the last turn a bit too wide on a Formula 1 track. Being down at least one goal as the clock hits 90 minutes and there’s not a lot of stoppage time. The well-educated, reasonable, lazy, McDonalds-eating thing to do is stop. Quit. You’ve done a great deal, but now you’re just hurting yourself and you should be content in making a good effort. Pat yourself on the back, treat yourself to a rest, you’ve earned it.

Am I just beating a dead horse, here? Am I saying anything new? I’m not just talking about this post, either. What possible difference can my work make? Do I really have a shot at producing anything interesting, anything worth reading?

I’m certainly not going to find out if I quit.

This is the home stretch. The checkered flag is in sight. A few more steps, painful as they might be, and I’ll cross that finish line. And yes, my performance will get picked apart in post. There’ll be slow-motion replay of every little mistake. People with a lot more experience than me will be all too happy to point out what I could do better, what they’d have done differently and might even tell me that I should have quit long ago.

I know this is coming. I know it might not be comfortable for me, that it will feel like I’ve just caught my breath only to have somebody punch me in the gut. But I accept this. I have to. I need to be aware of the fact that what I’ve done is imperfect, that it needs help, that it’s a lump of carbon deep in the darkness of my imagination and to truly shine it needs to be placed under pressure from a lot of outside forces. It’s frightening, on a fundamental level, and potentially painful, which might be why the last couple of days have seen me putting very few words of any significance down.

I’m girding my loins. I’m seeing the Wave coming and I’m ready to catch it. I hope some of you will come along for the ride, even if it’s just to tell me how much I suck.

I’m not quitting. I’m pounding out those last 5 meters. I’m making that last turn. I’m staying ahead of the defenders and waiting to get that pass that’ll let me slip one past the keeper. And for right now, I’m done making lousy metaphors.

It would be a hell of a waste of a writer’s conference if I didn’t do any writing, after all.