Paperless? Who, me?

So here's the deal: I won NaNoWriMo. Yay me.

But the novel itself is far from finished. I get the feeling the word count'll be 120-150K by the time I'm through. A beast such as this requires some planning. My pantsing days, I've come to realize, are long over. 

Second, while I've based books and stories on historical events before, Charlie Ward is the first project I've ever based on a person: Frederick Townsend Ward, an American sailor and soldier-of-fortune from the 1850s. I moved the setting into outer space and made the titular character female, and Charlie Ward: Interstellar Soldier-of-Fortune was born. 

My productivity since November ended has been abysmal: I think I've added a mere 5,500 words to the manuscript since December began. (Blame final exam prep.) My MC is currently slogging her way through the frozen mud of the Crimea a gigantic Earth-like planet where the Crimean War a great interplanetary war's going on between Russia, Turkey, France, and England four mighty planets battling for territorial supremacy and a warm-water port mineral rights and economic posturing. 

As you might expect, it's proven difficult to remain faithful to the source material and still portray futuristic space combat realistically. That, and I know jack-squat about the life military. Yesterday I had to call up an old high school buddy who was in the army to get help with the lingo, abbreviations, and politics. 

That means I've had to take a lot of notes for this story. Fred Ward's life (with a few strategic embellishments). Military abbreviations and SOPs (that aforementioned buddy of mine sent me the whole dang U.S. Army field operations manual—all 213 pages of it). An entire fictitious regiment and its captain, lieutenants, sergeants, and forty-odd privates, all with first and last names, disparate personalities, family histories, and unique homeworlds. The political climate of the eighteen or so planets I've had to invent for the purposes of this story, not to mention their masses, rotation speeds, meteorology, ecology, economics, culture, sociology, biology, and geology. Technologies out the wazoo, like a Podkletnov device for anti-gravity, a negative-mass particle generator for warp drive, MAHEM guns for ship-to-ship combat, a skyhook, robotics, communication devices, antipersonnel weapons...sheesh. And I haven't even gotten to the bit about ground warfare yet, or mining technology, both of which I'll need to mention in some detail for the first big land-battle sequence to make sense. 

Notepad just wasn't going to cut it this time, and I knew it. 

So I made the quantum leap to Evernote.

And it is simply splendid.

Click the pic to expand it and take a good, hard look—everything's right where it needs to be.  On the left are my separate notebooks, organized however I like them. I only have one notebook so far, for this particular story. Inside that notebook are five notes: some research I've done on space warfare, a page devoted to random snippets of quotes and dialogue, a discussion of planets and stations that populate this galaxy I'm building, a list of Charlie's unit on Achore (which is visible there on the right, as it's the one selected), and a rough outline of the story. 

Formerly, I kept all this crap in one single Notepad (.txt) file, and had to scroll up and down and poke through it every time I needed a bit of information for a story. No more. It's all in one place, organized and easily accessible. "Convenient" is simply not the word to describe it. "Heaven-sent" would be more like it. 

I'm going to take a day here after finals week ends (and I'm not busy in Seoraksan National Park or the nearby city of Sokcho over in Gangwon Province, or down in Gunsan in North Jeolla Province with my buddy Beau) and transfer EVERY FREAKING ONE of my Notepad files concerning the Revival series and Mugunghwa (my historical novel) onto Evernote.

Next step: find out what Scrivener's all about. I'll do a post about that soon, too.