Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that’s okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.