The Accidental NaNoWriMo

November is on the horizon, and that means thousands of writers are preparing to jam out 50,000-word novels in a month as part of NaNoWriMo. I’ve never done an official NaNoWriMo, but I keep meticulous records of how much I write per day when drafting a novel. I thought it might be interesting to look at the first draft timelines for four of my novels and see how they stack up against the NaNoWriMo pace.

These numbers and dates are for first drafts only. For the first three novels, there were, o...