A while ago I wrote a review of yWriter, the little software package I use (mostly) to write novels. I praised the fact that while it had an impressive array of useful features, almost all of them could be completely ignored without much detriment to your work process - this is a good thing. It means you're not spending hours farting about with something that feels like writing but actually isn't. That's far too seductive a game to play.

Liquid Story Binder is a beautiful software package that does exactly the opposite. You can have plot trees, character dossiers, galleries, timelines, mindmpas, outlines, journals, project goals, colour schemes for your work area, a music playlist, multimedia organiser, storyboarding, scene 'building', and a host of other things, most of which sound like things I've already listed but are apparently something completely different. It sounds wonderful - so many things you can do with your writing!

Oh - it also has a word processor. Yeah. The thing you actually use to write. I did actually purchase this software several years ago. I tried it for about a month before I gave up, realising that I was making dossiers and maps and outlines and plans, and fiddling with exactly how the work area looked (the interface is gorgeous - this is software that looks like it belongs on a Mac, not a PC) and not actually writing anything. Oh, my story looked brilliant in the project - a collection of background details and plot elements and other such author-seductions. But I hadn't started it, and I hadn't even realised that.

When I sat down to try to write without all the paraphenalia, it didn't really work. LSB expected me to create a whole host of things before I started writing - it wasn't happy just being used as a word processor. If I wanted to change something, like the arc of a character, so many other parts of LSB had to be changed. It became more work to maintain these extraneous pieces than it was to write the story.

Now, I'm sure dossiers, outlines and all of those things have their place - I've written about creating series bibles, for starters, and outlining your novel to see what the hell you've written. And I can certainly understand the desire to have everything in the one software package. Even though it doesn't make that much difference - you can have several programs open at once - there's a psychological urge to have it neatly contained in one program.

But I don't think software should force you to do this, and LSB just makes things a little too difficult to do things your way. It's a beautiful, feature-rich package, but those features are distractions, rather than essentials, and unless that happens to be exactly how you work (in which case, go check it out, it's not that expensive and I believe they have a free trial) it's going to get in the way.

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