It's ok to work on different projects when you are feeling a bit drained with your main WIP. Sometimes creativity is sparked by doing something else.
It's not a crime to relax and read. We write because we want to, it's our passion, not our master. Taking a day off is ok. Reading is also a great way to spark your creativity.
When you try too hard and you push your muse too far, she sometimes pushes back, and it's like running into a brick wall.
What ends up happening, is you stare blankly at your screen with nothing to write and a nagging feeling in your gut - that's self imposed guilt - because you aren't writing.
I've been doing that to myself lately. I want so badly to get my main WIP finished (Hunters & Prey - Book two of my Immortalis series), but I am stuck and it's making me cranky (and that's a bit of an understatement). My husband keeps telling me to relax, to do something else, but do I listen?
No.
LoL.
The other day I told him I wanted 30k words by the end of the month. It was my goal.
"I'm gonna finish this thing!"
His response... "Do they all have to be different words? We could start a word drive. Get people to donate their old words."
Bless his silly little heart. At that point I was rolling my eyes, but his humor was his way to tell me to lighten up.
He then asked me if I was on a deadline? If there a publisher breathing down my neck? Did I have a contract threatening to be broken by not having my WIP finished by the end of the month?
Of course my reply was no. (I'm still unpublished.)
"Then Relax. You have plenty of time to make it perfect."
He's right of course. I hate it when that happens.
I'm not published yet. I have time to make it shine. And it needs to. If my first works aren't stunning, I have no hope for future work.
So the moral of the story is, "Don't push so hard. Perfection takes time. You have to let the muse work for you. If you are unpublished, you have all the time in the world to make things perfect."
Save the worry for later when you are a multi-published author and working on a deadline.
Remember the reason we write is because we love it. Don't change that with unnecessary pressure.