[gmw]

I've done the first book of a series, currently struggling to conclude the second and have an rough outline for a third and yet another book two-thirds done that I am not sure where (or if) it fits yet ... and various other bits. So far I've been doing it all in OpenOffice: Each chapter in its own document, a master document for merging it all together and a collection of other documents for various sorts of notes.

It's been working okay, but the further I get in the more I find I'm having trouble remembering whether item x was in the notes for this book or the last book. One of the documents I keep for each book is a time-line which helps me keep the various threads working together consistently (it's quite curious to see how threads feed off each other as a result). Due to the way I have been writing these novels the time-lines play an important role.

Anyway, I've been browsing through this forum and noticing quite a number of people using Scrivener, so I downloaded and took a look. It's interesting, and there is a lot to like in it, but I'm not convinced it will help me very much over what I am already doing in OpenOffice ... in particular, I couldn't work out how I might get it to help me keep my time-lines - and if that's going to be stuck in OpenOffice then I figure the rest might as well stay there as well.

I'm not so unhappy with OpenOffice that I would leave it for just anything, I even have a sort of automatic log/snapshot feature by using subversion (I'm a programmer so it's already on my system, my books are just another project on the server). But I was wondering what other software may make keeping track of my ever expanding story a little easier.

I'm about to trial Liquid Story Binder as I see that has a time-line feature. I can't say that WriteWayPro looks appealing from the website, but I guess I'll take a look at that if LSB doesn't work out. yWriter5 I've yet to study.

I was curious to know how others cope.