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.

Unless I'm totally off on my estimated wordcount, I've passed the half-way point on the first draft of Cog and smack in the middle of the big middle story plot events. Progress marches on.

Congrats. Have you been keeping on your query letters? Cause trying to get published is part of the process too.

Yeah, about that, not so much. It's hard to pull away some time right now while the new story is rolling. Since I might be reworking the pitch it's a bit more involved than tweaking the letter for a different agent.

Still, I know I've got to get on it eventually.

Next onerous task day?

Maybe.

So an editor is interested in the ghost YA but had some suggestions. She talked to my agent yesterday who then passed on the suggestions to me and we talked it out. Now, normally, I'm all "hell, no" about making changes without a contract in place because I've been burned monumentally in the past, however--

These were only suggestions for some cuts on the partial and I'm not so invested in this story that the idea of rearranging things and killing darlings was sending me rushing for the smelling salts. So after I got off the phone with Lovely Agent, I set to work, chopped 2 chapters wholesale, trimmed some fat from other chapters, rearranged the living HELL out of what was there (Chapter 1 is now Chapter 5) and turned it back into my agent less than two hours after our conversation.

Fear me.

(Whether or not it's exactly what the editor was thinking, who knows, but my being able to turn something around so quickly should bode well.)

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

I'm just starting to learn to use it, and it's really making a difference. I need to decide whether to move my stuff over from Excel and places. Excel works totally differently from the way my brain does, so it could be worth the effort.

Fear me.

Ooh. I do.

Seska, I gave Scrivener another try and said, sod it-- I just couldn't get behind it, but then I found Story Mill which has some similar attributes to Scrivener, but for me is far more intuitive.

Just an FYI.