Hi all, I' developing a fantasy novel and I already created a lot of material until now (note that I'm not a writer but a sw developer). I find it hard to take track of every piece of information I add and how it relates with everything else and I wonder if there are (possibly free) tools that help this task. What I'm after is mainly a tool that let me build genealogies of my characters, to set the story (and the background history) on a timeline and to manage the history, the ideas, and the other material I come with. I know a few tools that, separately, could handle this (i.e a UML tool and its class diagram for the genealogies), but I'm looking for something that integrate all this. Do you know something like this? Thank you!

Try Evernote for PC, or Journler for Mac.

http://www.evernote.com/
http://journler.com/

Additionally, a wiki or plain old flow charts do the job well.

I use a personal wiki to organise my thoughts and for larger creative projects; it's good for anything where there isn't a linear flow of information from section to section. WikidPad is a wiki that's open source and so cross-platform, although I prefer to use VoodooPad for the Mac.

There's also combination editors like Scrivener for the Mac; I haven't used this much myself, although I did buy a copy for my writer brother and he's given me a good impression of it.

Thank you for your help. Actually, the linked tools are not exactly what I was looking for (they have not the timeline or the 'class view' tools), and I thought that there would be plenty of such things out there.
I will give a try to WikidPad (or similar software): perhaps it together with a UML software could provide what I need.

Perhaps I will code one myself in the future :-)

Thank you again!

Maybe you can try MS Office OneNote, it's not free, but it's a great tool for organizing notes :)

Regards,

Vicente

If anyone is interested, I've found GenealogyJ that should provide both the timeline and the genealogy features. I hope that this and the wiki tool can help me.
Thank you all!