I'm human, not a machine. So why do I expect myself to be able to churn out X thousand words a day, regardless of what else is going on in my life? I'm a big fan of 'a little and often' and it's true that the more you write the more it becomes a habit, like brushing your teeth, but sometimes even writing a little is impossible. For every Stephen King, with his 2000 words a day, every day, there's a Jane Austen, who was miserable during the years she lived in Bath and stopped writing, only restarting when she moved to Chawton.
Creativity can be stimulated by stress and adverse conditions, but it can also dry up. As writers we have to learn to recognise when our personal creativity is lying fallow and not beat ourselves up because we're not writing. Writing is not a competative sport. If you finished that short story, then you finished it. No reader is going to care whether you took two days, two weeks or two years to write it. All that matters is that the work is good. Now, pass me the paracetemol...
