wanderlustminded-deactivated201 asked: How do I know if I'm writing too slow? Should I trudge on when the words are molasses, or do I take a break? How many words per day are acceptable, or is there no minimum? Or, even, what do you do when writing is hard?

You keep writing.

I don’t know anything else to tell you. Once the book or the story is written nobody cares and nobody knows what was written on a good day or what was written on a bad day. Nobody knows or cares how fast it was written. (Coraline was written over ten years. That’s an average of about nine words a day.) By the time the book’s been copy-edited and is ready to be published, nobody will know or care or remember which days you enjoyed writing it and which days you didn’t, not even you.

You can always take a break (you can do anything. Your rules). Sometimes I stop writing stories when I don’t know what happens next and come back to them when I do. But it helps to be writing something else in the meantime.