software I’m taking for a spin right now is Scrivener, which is a tool to help you organize your writing. Basically it’s a glorified text editor, but it adds a way for you to organize your writing (e.g. fiction) hierarchically by scene or snippet, and attaches metadata to each, so you can add summaries or notes or researched information to each section without altering the content of the section itself.
From the parent folder of each section, you can see a “corkboard” view of the summaries of each section, drag and drop to reorder sections, and generate an outline. And when you’re all ready to send the whole shebang off to a proofreader or editor or friend, it’ll export the contents as a Word file or in various other formats.
Writing, simplified. I love this thing so much after a few days that I am definitely going to buy it. Awesome. (Via argh ink)