Happy National Novel Writing Month! Good luck to all of you writers out there. I wish I could be joining you this year, but I’m in the middle of moving, and still have a lot of reading to do for Book Three, so I’m just here to cheer you on from the sidelines.

If you haven’t participated in “NaNoWriMo” before, or even heard of it, it’s a month-long writing challenge with the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. The point is to “write with abandon,” as the website says, which is a beautiful concept. Throw asi...