Hi, Prill and Dotsie!
Prill, I'm so glad you checked the forum, too! Good luck with your deadline.
Dotsie, I have a goal of writing one chapter per week, which means I finish the first draft within 6-8 months. Then I usually do the rewrite within another 4-6 months.
I am the consummate daydreamer. I live in the minds of my characters. I form whole scenes in my mind before I ever approach the keyboard. I do a lot of long distance travel, and I try to take any road but the interstate. I might be traveling at dawn on a back country road, see a ramshackle house with a waft of smoke coming from the chimney, and I have the basis for a house in my book. By the time I sit down to write, the entire chapter comes out within 2-3 hours (the creative part). Then comes the technical part: adding scent, color, and atmosphere.
When I was writing The China Conspiracy, there was a chapter between a Governor-elect who believed that Tibet was better off under Chinese rule than they had been under Tibetan rule, and a reporter who believed just the opposite. I spent weeks researching China's official stance on Tibet, "brainwashed" myself to believe as they did, and wrote the scene only from the Governor-elect's point of view. Then I cleansed myself of that thinking, spent more weeks obtaining information from official U.S. government transcripts going back to the end of World War II, all the way to the present day... and wrote the reporter's rebuttal to everything his interviewee had to say. Then I melded the two together into a heck of a debate. I spent much more time on that one scene than I do on a typical scene.