Oops - hit that button by mistake... I wanted to say thank you for writing this, and you are quite correct: beating myself up constantly for not being productive is not making things better, it is making them worse. And it certainly is not helping...

I've been struggling for the past year and a half to finish my first novel. I don't even have a draft done yet, and already I feel like I need to go back and rewrite from the beginning. It has been an absolutely terrible time - deaths of loved ones,...