You hear some odd advice in this business at times. One of the oddest old saws is the one that says you must always be writing something. Anything? Well, the conversation never gets that far. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that writing is an obsessive act, a kind of mental warfare. Walking away from the battlefront risks losing the campaign. Ooer....

My opinion (and it is just my opinion)?

Poppycock. Dangerous poppycock too.

Let me be plain about this. I write at least a book a year. I always deliver ahead of time. It's been ages since any of those have required major surgery before publication. I like to think I'm professional about what I do.
<ul>
	<li>I do not have serious word targets in terms of output (though I will occasionally try to stick to an optimum length for scenes -- for narrative reasons, not 'productivity').</li>
	<li>I never work weekends or nights unless I'm travelling and there's nothing better to do.</li>
	<li>I will from time to time quite deliberately walk away from a project and not read a word of it for a week or two.</li>
</ul>
<!--more-->The present WIP is a case in point. Here's the word count status over the three months I've been working on it.
<ul>
	<li>December 25: 5,100 words</li>
	<li>January 26: 23,000 words</li>
	<li>February 3: 35,618 words</li>
	<li>February 17, 50,000 words</li>
	<li>February 25, 55,000 words</li>
	<li>And today? 58,228 words.</li>
</ul>
Eek! Am I slowing down? In word terms, yes. But for the last two weeks I've been revising the story, making it work more fluently with a bit of luck. Refining the narrative so I'm better placed to proceed to the next stage.

Then at the weekend I went off to do some promotion in Dublin, and tomorrow it's a research and TV trip to Italy. How much writing will I do over the next ten days? Very little in all probability.

Does this worry me? Not at all. A bit of space between you and your work is good at times. You come back at it with fresh eyes. Problems which once seemed insurmountable sometimes appear puny and easily dealt with. If the story's working you'll soon find your way back into it and begin to hit the kind of output levels you had before you took a breather.

The problem with the 'I will write 40,000 words a month' school of fiction is it's based around quantity alone. What if half those words are the wrong ones? Then you've only written 20,000 words really. And worse, you're going to have to spend time going through that 40K mess working out which ones are good ones and which ones expendable.

Writing's not a race. At least if it is, it's a marathon, not a sprint, for most of us anyway. How do I meet those deadlines? Simple, I take what's in the contract and subtract a month or two of my own. Then carry on to my own schedule, not the contracts.

Books get finished through steady, efficient workmanship, produced by writers in control of their craft. Not by hammering out words incessantly and hoping that somehow in the end they'll fit.

Oh -- and the other joy of not writing is it gives me more time to read, and there's never enough of that these days either. And a lovely stash of books just went into the case and the Kindle for that too.