Okay, so I'm cruising along on Dorian. (yay!)

It's a completely different genre for me. (eek!)

And I've got a bit of a conundrum. (oh noes!)

You see, normally, I'm a very linear writer. Like super crazy linear, because that's how my mind works. Start at the beginning of the story and write through to the end. Which is also what I'm doing with this MS, in terms of telling the story as I'm imagining it, so that's not the problem. Problem is, it also jumps around in time, which is giving my linear little brain fits. I'm so afraid I'm going to miss something or mess something up. Especially since this has mystery elements, also a new concept for me.

Any tips? Am I going to have to resort to a storyboard? Index cards? March Madness brackets?

HALP

I've always liked Excel spreadsheets. Easy to move around and you can put in columns for "Before X happens, this needs to occur?" and "Who needs to be where?"

What you need is MS Project.

Excel spreadsheets make me twitch, but I can see where they would be helpful.

ita, what's MS Project?

I feel like I should go back to Scrivener and figure out how to use it, since so many folks seem to swear by it, especially with respect to the organizational tools (they even have a virtual cork board and index cards) but the time I tried, it just frustrated me.

I like Excel because it doesn't ask for a lot of formatting. I also use scraps of paper or Notepad if I just want to take a bunch of notes or put down a fast outline.

I'm big with the notebooks and outlining, but I almost feel that for this project, since I have chunks that take place in different time periods, it might be good to have some sort of method by which to keep track of them-- sort of to keep an eye on the balance of scenes.

I cannot do big finales without something to help me keep track of all the characters and converging storylines. I'm very linear too, and I have to know where I'm going before I can move forward with scenes.

I've been playing around with Scrivener a little bit and it's got a lot of potential to be very useful. I like real-life index cards, so the virtual corkboard works well for me. Even so, figuring out exactly how it works and how to use it - well, I'm not there yet.

I use Microsoft OneNote to organize notes. It's fairly flexible and it keeps track of where you've pasted external bit from.

I can't do anything without an outline. I find that MS word multi-level lists do fine for me. Can move stuff around anyway I want. Not as powerful as the other options, but for me when writing something where I will change my mind a lot about the organization works fine. Would not use it for project management, but to me a single written work is differnt problem. Everyone is different so not saying it would work for you.