OneNote and the author

One of the things I'm attempting to do while waiting for my editor's thoughts ( they are now down on apper apaprently but she wants to add some other colleagues' insights) is to come to grips with OneNote.

Jami Davenport put something on the PAN loop about a cheat sheet for authors which explains the basic thinking.
OneNote comes with Microsoft Office. If you don't have it, you can download a version.
OneNote is an easy way to share various info  -- think authors creating a continuity and needing to have a *bible* of notes which is shared between several people and can be updated by them.
It is also easy to transfer research between notebooks.
In theory it means capturing images/urls from the internet is easy. And I should not have to rely on my scraps of paper.
There are apparently apps for various tablets and smart phone.
What it is not -- a replacement for Word or for getting the words down on paper.

It is a great way to capture thoughts and images and have them there at your fingertips. This is particularly useful when you come to revise a project that has been sitting for several months and you discover you have to write a new scene and have forgotten various bits and what you had is now lost somewhere. You then lose an hour searching, can't find the scrap of paper but do unearth several interesting bits of info. You then proceed on a wing and prayer, knowing that the one last read through should bring any discrpencies only to have an eagle eyed copy editor mention that you have given two different very minor characters the same name etc. There are reasons why I keep of list of all named characters (if I can find it!)

OneNote does have a searchable feature whic will search through all your notebooks. There is even a place to put unfiled notes.

Having played around with it for a bit, it does make sense. However, I still like to do my plotting with pad and pen. Totally off screen
It is best to have a notebook for each project. You can have various sections such as character, plot, settings, research info etc.
Under character, you can have different pages. There is a tab on the right side which lists pages and subpages. So you could have a list of characters, a seperate page for each main character and within the main characters page, have subpages for backstory etc.

A bit more about One Note and the writing process

As Anne McAllister mentioned she hadn't used it...
One Note is the notebook programme for Microsoft Office. You can find it in the Office tools if it is not immediately visible.
Like all Microsoft products, there is a tutorial and it is really designed for corporate team work.
You can even create a shared notebook -- one where people edit at the same time and all shared notebooks are updated. This might be a good application if authors are working on a continuity for example, as then the Bible of the series is quickly updated. You can even do it as a live sharing session. Just do not ask me how to do it. It is in the tutorial!
I have not done a continuity -- they sound like hard work, but I do have to create bibles for my linked books, rather than just relying on memory. A shared notebook as well as linked notebooks has a certain appeal.
You can also create notebooks for different books, create tables, and etc. Everything is importable to Word. You can paste pictures, draw and have a variety of different notes. You can also capture webpages, clip pictures etc. SO if you wanted to make a virtual collage, you could do it. You can do lasso select to draw over pictures, and it does have a text recognition feature.
You could create a notebook for each story, plus have a master notebook for the series. In some ways the storage system for notebooks is better than creating word files as you can have tabs etc.
But like anything, it is just a tool and the main thing is to write the story.
Anyway, I suspect I shall use it.

Yesterday, my lovely editor sent through my cover for The Viking's Captive Princess. It is wonderful and I think the lovely Judy York who did the cover Taken by the Viking and A Noble Captive also did this cover. I hadn't realised until yesterday that she did ANC. Personally I think the inside front cover of ANC deserves its own front cover!
However, the VCP cover is not a jpeg and I can't post it. As soon as I get a jpeg, I will post as it is one of my favourite covers. And yes, I know I have to do the excerpt as well...
Please bear with me on this. It is called admin. And yes, I am a tad overexcited, but the cover has a great feel about it, much better than VWUW.

My youngest is better and no longer as pale. The whole BRaTY thing seems to have worked. He did refuse the rice though.

Right back to writing this book. It is the first of a trilogy so you can see why I thinking about bibles and shared notebooks as I want the continuity there. Had I had such things with the Viken trilogy, certain things might not have taken so long...Live and learn.
But I am so pleased that Isabel Swift shared her insight gained from being Nora's editor!