Once we used index cards. Now we use ... well, what do we use? And how do we use it Writing any book, especially a science book, involves gathering and then somehow harnessing and drawing from an enormous amount of raw material — scientific papers; articles, video, audio from mass media; notes from reading in a huge variety or sources; interviews, web pages, stray thoughts, scenes from one's one interviews. One of the writer's biggest challenges is how to find, gather, sift, save, and ultimately parse that material into bits and pieces with which to build the book. Good software can aid this task. But to succeed rather than go mad, you must choose and use your tools wisely — and create a workflow that helps you harness and shape your material in a way that complements your work and cognitive style. In this session, two experienced authors on the stage, and hopefully several more in the room, will describe how they've gone about this — their physical and software tools, their workflows, their work habits — with an emphasis on finding a smart path from raw material tosolid draft. We'll cover both Mac and PC tools. Then we'll see what the crowd uses.
