As much as I like computers (and make my living on them), I’m not the biggest fan of documents on them.  I find them tedious and difficult to reference compared to textbooks and papers, so even when I’m working on projects that are computer based, I tend to print out my references, task lists and suchlike, rather than keeping it all electronic.

I’m currently in the process of doing something similar for the novel, collecting together the various references and bits of background information I have drafted into a single summary document that I’m going to print out, to go with the character summaries I already have sitting in a pile beside me.  This is the Not Much Fun part of writing, I think — collating, preparing, researching.  Occasionally interesting but frequently dull.  I remember reading something to that effect once, by Robert Asprin; he described how, while the writing was always fun to do, the work you had to do before the writing could be pretty tedious.

However, it’s what I need.  In case I didn’t make this point clear, the internals of my brain seemed to be pretty disorganised — there’s plenty in there, but actually getting at it and pulling it out is a challenge.  Having external prompts is a huge help, as I have access to the things I’ve thought of that I might forget about otherwise.  So while it’s not much fun, I think at the end of the day, it’ll mean everything turns out better; and since I’m planning to keep on buckling down through the NaNo period, I really want all this to be complete beforehand…