The Internet is a fabulous thing. I do a lot of my research for my books on the Internet, from looking at historical sources to contemporary locations to costumes to fact checking and even some plot ideas. I used bookmarks for years to try to keep track of these disparate sources, but frankly it was too hard to find what I needed in my notes, especially when I only had one or two sentences that I really needed from a long article.

And then I found Evernote. It’s a website where you can store all kinds of information: pictures, text, whole websites. It can also “clip” these notes from your desktop, or, via a smartphone app, your photos, etc. You can not only tag the notes you add, but also group your “notes” by topics, separated into “notebooks.” Probably the best part is that you can search your notes to find just what you’re looking for I *think* there are other good programs that can do this, but this is the only one I’d used until this year, and I like it.

So what’s this got to do with NaNo? When you’re writing as fast as you can, and you need to stop to look something up, or to find something you know you looked up when you were plotting on or around October 23, or to remember that one really cool idea you had from that weird news article that would be perfect right here, instead of trying to dig through your bookmarks or search your web history, you just go to your account, and either search your notes, or look through the notebook for this book, and you’re set!

This year, I’m trying out Scrivener for Nano, and I really love that you can save your research right in your project file. However, I also like Evernote’s capability to highlight a picture, paragraph or phrase on any website (or from my phone!) and save it in your notebook with a single click. So we’ll see what I end up using long term.

I also like this because I’ve used it to save research on ideas I might write later—much later. Like for NaNo 2011, I wrote an idea that I’d been thinking about for probably two years. Some of my notes on the pseudohistory I unapologetically used were clipped in July 2010. As I was gearing up to actually write the book, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to remember a lot of the things I’d need, until I saw the name of the notebook on Evernote. Voila! Lots of cool facts that I wouldn’t have to hunt down again!

How do you keep track of your research so you can find it when you need it?