As I’ve said repeatedly here, keeping a book diary – for research, a daily journal, character and research details – is fundamental to the way I work. You can read <a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/dock_thumb.jpg2009/08/05/writing-a-book-diary/" target="_blank">more about it here</a>, and even more if you search for ‘MacJournal’ in the sidebar.

But I’m now on Windows. Mariner have a companion app WinJournal which looks much the same. But Office comes with its own research app, OneNote. So it makes sense to test that first. Here’s a demo book journal I’ll be showing at my workshop for the <a href="http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/arts_entertainment/literature_development/literature_festival/" target="_blank">Derbyshire Literature Festival</a> next Saturday (sorry – the Saturday session in Bolsover is sold out, but there are still tickets for the general talk on Friday in Ilkeston I think).

My verdict on OneNote: it looks impenetrable to begin with. But beneath the first impressions this is one heck of a piece of software for authors – and comes bundled with Office anyway. This is the Office 2010 beta you see here by the way.

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I first used OneNote years ago when I had one of the first Windows XP Tablet computers made by Acer. It was a wonderful little machine, though people used to laugh at tablets back then, honest.

OneNote is a kind of notebook, a place to store text, pictures, links, whatever, organised into sections, tabs and pages. Perfect for a book diary. On the Tablet you can write on those pages too, and OneNote will even find a handwritten word just as easily as if you typed it.

The Acer eventually died and I focused on the Mac more and more. OneNote has come on a lot in the meantime. OneNote files are stored wherever you want them on your PC. If you then sync and back them up through <a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/dock_thumb.jpg2010/05/25/backing-up-windows-does-it-better/" target="_blank">Mesh</a> you can keep the same project in place on several different machines and filed securely on the web. At some point I gather there’ll be a web app too, at which point it’s probably bye bye Evernote for me. But not yet.

Two bad things about OneNote. It’s difficult to import data from other applications simply. No impossible but difficult. And the app looks a bit odd to begin with because there’s nothing else I know quite like it. But enough moans. Here is a fully-functioning book diary using the Hewson system, one that does everything MacJournal does and a bit more. My preferred option from now on. First the main screen.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/mainscreen.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="Main screen" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/mainscreen_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="Main screen" width="604" height="460"></a>

Here you see everything that’s going to go into the left brain management of a book called <em>Charlie and the Vampire </em>(an imaginary book, mind. I’m not going to write it). The whole diary is a tab in the section where I keep information related to events I’m doing. If this was a real book it would be in a section or notebook dedicated to actual book projects. On the right everything is held in pages and sub pages. The top page described the project. Beneath we see…

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/outline.png"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="outline" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/outline_thumb.png" border="0" alt="outline" width="604" height="465"></a>

Dead simple to write. The usual system – tab to demote, shift-tab to promote. It may just look like text but it isn’t. You can drag those headings around as the little icon on the left suggests.

You could do the diary the way I do it in MacJournal – as a set of separate pages. But my diary entries are short – ideas, observations and running word counts. It’s easy to write them in a single column, each fronted by a datestamp the app provides.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/diary.png"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="diary" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/diary_thumb.png" border="0" alt="diary" width="604" height="319"></a>

Note those little icons. They’re tags. You just click and insert one. The system comes with a variety of its own – here you see a check box for a to do and a question mark for a question. You tag anything you want as you go through your journal. At any stage you can simply say… show me all the tags and they appear across the sections like this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/tags.png"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="tags" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/tags_thumb.png" border="0" alt="tags" width="604" height="278"></a>

Would be nice if that tag summary box gave you a preview of the tag context instead of simply taking you directly to each. But this is still beta… maybe things will get better in the final version. Still enough for what I need though frankly.

Research is handled very simply and effectively. Naturally everything is searchable too.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/research.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="Research" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/research_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="Research" width="604" height="431"></a>

You can get things into the system in a variety of ways. Type or cut and paste. Hit Windows-key S and you can take a screenshot of anything in front of you. Here’s something very cool too. When you import a screenshot OneNote somehow ‘reads’ the text, even though it’s a picture. So a word within your screenshot will still appear in a search. This is incredibly clever and useful.

If you want to keep things as text though either cut and paste or print anything you like straight to a OneNote folder like this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/printdukeofyork.png"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="print duke of york" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/printdukeofyork_thumb.png" border="0" alt="print duke of york" width="604" height="436"></a>

It will then appear in its own page wherever you want it. You can’t edit the contents but you can still make notes around it.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/screen.png"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="screen" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/screen_thumb.png" border="0" alt="screen" width="604" height="426"></a>

Handling characters is very straightforward. As with MacJournal I write some brief bio details but principally rely on pasting in actual references to a character in the book. The reader doesn’t see your character notes, only the words on the pages. It’s important to remember that.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/character.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="character" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/character_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="character" width="604" height="461"></a>

OneNote has a lot of little tricks up its sleeve, only a few of which I’ve discovered so far. One is that it understands wiki formatting. In the example above Mickey Framlingham just occurred to me as I typed that sentence so he isn’t in the character list. Here’s what happens if I go back and type his name with two square brackets around it – [[Mickey Framlingham]].

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/wiki.jpg"><img style="display:inline;border:0;" title="wiki" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/wiki_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="wiki" width="604" height="103"></a>

OneNote recognises that those brackets mean a link. If a page called Mickey Framlingham existed it would link to it automatically. Since it doesn’t it just creates a page with that name. Now that is nice…

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/dock.jpg"><img style="display:inline;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;border:0;" title="dock" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/dock_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="dock" width="253" height="484" align="right"></a> Here’s another delight. You can dock your notebook to the side of the screen like this. Once it’s there you can write away in Word or whatever and refer to your notes very easily, writing and changing them as needed.

This really is the way I intend to work from now on. It’s simple, intuitive and immensely powerful. Thanks to the sync powers of Mesh I can work on the same two documents – a Word book file and a OneNote notebook – on multiple machines and have the results backed up and kept in the right state everywhere without a second thought.

One thing I should have mentioned about Mesh earlier. As I understand it the thing <em>only </em>syncs when you close a file. This may sound like a backward step. It isn’t. All of the sync problems I’ve encountered with service such as Dropbox and iDisk have stemmed from files that have been left open on one computer then opened for edit on another. You simply can’t do that with Mesh.

It took me a while to get to grips with OneNote. It was very tempting at times to give up and think…. meh, I’ll just get WinJournal instead. But this system is miles better than my old MacJournal setup. It lets me see and manage the info I want much more easily once I’ve now begun to get the hang of things.

There is, however, one huge downside. I now find myself lusting after a little Tablet like that old Acer I once had. In six weeks or so I will be sitting in the reading room of the Pierpont Morgan library in New York looking at something that will kick off the new book for 2013. It would be a wonderful note-taking gizmo for that.